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THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS 


7- 
THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS 


BY 

rKEDERIC  HARRISON 


KctD  Yorfe 
MACMILLAN    AND    CO, 

AND     LONDON 

1893 

All  rights  reserved 


n  a 


r.Ue> 


CHAPTER    I. 

HOW  TO   READ. 

It  is  the  fashion  for  those  who  have 
any  connection  with  letters  to  expatiate 
on  the  infinite  blessings  of  literature,  and 
the  miraculous  achievements  of  the  press  : 
to  extol,  as  a  gift  above  price,  the  taste 
for  study  and  the  love  of  reading.  Far 
be  it  from  me  to  gainsay  the  inestimable 
value  of  good  books,  or  to  discourage  any 
man  from  reading  the  best ;  but  I  often 
think  that  we  forget  that  other  side  to 
this  glorious  view  of  literature — the  mis- 
use of  books,  the  debilitating  waste  of 
brain  in  aimless,  promiscuous,  vapid 
reading,   or    even,   it    may   be,   in    the 


2  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

poisonous    inhalation    of    mere   literary 
garbage  and  bad  men's  worst  thoughts. 

For  what  can  a  book  be  more  than  the 
man  who  wrote  it  ?  The  brightest  genius 
seldom  puts  the  best  of  his  own  soul  into 
his  printed  page ;  and  some  famous  men 
have  certainly  put  the  worst  of  theirs. 
Yet  are  all  men  desirable  companions, 
much  less  teachers,  able  to  give  us  advice, 
even  of  those  who  get  reputation  and 
command  a  hearing  ?  To  put  out  of  the 
question  that  writing  which  is  positively 
bad,  are  we  not,  amidst  the  multiplicity 
of  books  and  of  writers,  in  continual 
danger  of  being  drawn  off  by  what  is 
stimulating  rather  than  solid,  by  curi- 
osity after  something  accidentally  noto- 
rious, by  what  has  no  intelligible  thing 
to  recommend  it,  except  that  it  is  new  ? 
Now,  to  stuff  our  minds  with  what  is 
simply  trivial,  simply  curious,  or  that 
which  at  best  has  but  a  low  nutritive 
power,  this  is  to  close  our  minds  to  what 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  3 

is  solid  and  enlarging,  and  spiritually 
sustaining.  Whether  our  neglect  of  the 
great  books  comes  from  our  not  reading 
at  all,  or  from  an  incorrigible  habit  of 
reading  the  little  books,  it  ends  in  just 
the  same  thing.  And  that  thing  is 
ignorance  of  aU  the  greater  literature  of 
the  world.  To  neglect  all  the  abiding 
parts  of  knowledge  for  the  sake  of  the 
evanescent  parts  is  really  to  know  no- 
thing worth  knowing.  It  is  in  the  end 
the  same,  whether  we  do  not  use  our 
minds  for  serious  study  at  all,  or  whether 
we  exhaust  them  by  an  impotent  voracity 
for  desultory  "  information  " — a  thing  as 
fruitful  as  whistling.  Of  the  two  evils  I 
prefer  the  former.  At  least,  in  that 
case,  the  mind  is  healthy  and  open.  It 
is  not  gorged  and  enfeebled  by  excess  in 
that  which  cannot  nourish,  much  less 
enlarge  and  beautify  our  nature. 

But  there  is   much   more  than  this. 
Even  to  those  who  resolutely  avoid  the 


4  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

idleness  of  reading  what  is  trivial,  a 
difficulty  is  presented — a  difficulty  every 
day  increasing  by  virtue  even  of  our 
abundance  of  books.  What  are  the  sub- 
jects, what  are  the  class  of  books  we  are 
to  read,  in  what  order,  with  what  con- 
nection, to  what  ultimate  use  or  object  ? 
Even  those  who  are  resolved  to  read  the 
better  books  are  embarrassed  by  a  field  of 
choice  practically  boundless.  The  longest 
life,  the  greatest  industry,  joined  to  the 
most  powerful  memory,  would  not  suffice 
to  make  us  profit  from  a  hundredth  part 
of  the  world  of  books  before  us.  If  the 
great  Newton  said  that  he  seemed  to 
have  been  all  his  life  gathering  a  few 
shells  on  the  shore,  whilst  a  boundless 
ocean  of  truth  still  lay  beyond  and  un- 
known to  him,  how  much  more  to  each 
of  us  must  the  sea  of  literature  be  a 
pathless  immensity  beyond  our  powers 
of  vision  or  of  reach — an  immensity  in 
which  industry  itself  is  useless  without 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  5 

judgment,  method,  discipline  ;  where  it  is 
of  infinite  importance  what  we  can  learn 
and  remember,  and  of  utterly  no  im- 
portance what  we  may  have  once  looked 
at  or  heard  of.  Alas !  the  most  of  our 
reading  leaves  as  little  mark  even  in  our 
own  education  as  the  foam  that  gathers 
round  the  keel  of  a  passing  boat !  For 
myself,  I  am  inclined  to  think  the  most 
useful  help  to  reading  is  to  know  what 
we  should  not  read,  what  we  can  keep 
out  from  that  small  cleared  spot  in  the 
overgrown  jungle  of  "information,"  the 
corner  which  we  can  call  our  ordered 
patch  of  fruit-bearing  knowledge.  The 
incessant  accumulation  of  fresh  books 
must  hinder  any  real  knowledge  of  the 
old;  for  the  multiplicity  of  volumes  be- 
comes a  bar  upon  our  use  of  any.  In 
literature  especially  does  it  hold — that 
we  cannot  see  the  wood  for  the  trees. 

Ho  w  shall  we  choose  our  books  ?   Which 
are  the  best,  the  eternal,  indispensable 


6  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

books  ?  To  all  to  whom  reading  is  some- 
thing more  than  a  refined  idleness  these 
questions  recur,  bringing  with  them  the 
sense  of  bewilderment ;  and  a  still,  small 
voice  within  us  is  for  ever  crying  out  for 
some  guide  across  the  Slough  of  Despond 
of  an  illimitable  and  ever-swelling  litera- 
ture. How  many  a  man  stands  beside 
it,  as  uncertain  of  his  pathway  as  the 
Pilgrim,  when  he  who  dreamed  the  im- 
mortal dream  heard  him  "break  out 
with  a  lamentable  cry ;  saying,  what 
shall  I  do?" 

And  this,  which  comes  home  to  all  of 
us  at  times,  presses  hardest  upon  those 
who  have  lost  the  opportunity  of  sys- 
tematic education,  who  have  to  educate 
themselves,  or  who  seek  to  guide  the 
education  of  their  young  people.  Sys- 
tematic reading  is  but  little  in  favour 
even  amongst  studious  men  ;  in  a  true 
sense  it  is  hardly  possible  for  women. 
A  comprehensive  course  of  home  study. 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  7 

and  a  guide  to  books,  fit  for  the  highest 
education  of  women,  is  yet  a  blank  page 
remaining  to  be  filled.  Generations  of 
men  of  culture  have  laboured  to  organise 
a  system  of  reading  and  materials  ap- 
propriate for  the  methodical  education 
of  men  in  academic  lines.  Teaching 
equal  in  mental  calibre  to  any  that  is 
open  to  men  in  universities,  yet  modified 
for  the  needs  of  those  who  must  study 
at  home,  remains  in  the  dim  pages  of 
that  melancholy  volume  entitled  Libri 
valcle  desiderati. 

I  do  not  aspire  to  fill  one  of  those 
blank  pages  ;  but  I  long  to  speak  a  word 
or  two,  as  the  Pilgrim  did  to  Neighbour 
Pliable,  upon  the  glories  that  await  those 
who  will  pass  through  the  narrow  wicket- 
gate.  On  this,  if  one  can  find  anything 
useful  to  say,  it  may  be  chiefly  from  the 
memory  of  the  waste  labour  and  pitiful 
stumbling  in  the  dark  which  fill  up  so 
much  of  the  travail  that  one  is  fain  to 


5  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

call  one's  own  education.  "We  who  have 
wandered  in  the  wastes  so  long,  and  lost 
so  much  of  our  lives  in  our  wandering, 
may  at  least  offer  warnings  to  younger 
wayfarers,  as  men  who  in  thorny  paths 
have  borne  the  heat  and  burden  of  the 
day  might  give  a  clue  to  their  journey  to 
those  who  have  yet  a  morning  and  a 
noon.  As  I  look  back  and  think  of  those 
cataracts  of  printed  stuff  which  honest 
compositors  set  up,  meaning,  let  us  trust, 
no  harm,  and  which  at  least  found  them 
in  daily  bread, — printed  stuff"  which  I 
and  the  rest  of  us,  to  our  infinitely  small 
profit,  have  consumed  with  our  eyes,  not 
even  making  an  honest  living  of  it,  but 
much  impairing  our  substance, — I  could 
almost  reckon  the  printing  press  as 
amongst  the  scourges  of  mankind.  I  am 
grown  a  wiser  and  a  sadder  man,  im- 
portunate, like  that  Ancient  Mariner,  to 
tell  each  blithe  wedding  guest  the  tale  of 
his   shipwreck    on  the    infinite  sea  of 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  9 

printer's  ink,  as  one  escaped  by  mercy 
and  grace  from  the  region  where  there 
is  water,  water,  everywhere,  and  not  a 
drop  to  drink. 

A  man  of  power,  who  has  got  more 
from  books  than  most  of  his  contem- 
poraries, once  said :  "  Form  a  habit  of 
reading,  do  not  mind  what  you  read  ;  the 
reading  of  better  books  will  come  when 
you  have  a  habit  of  reading  the  inferior. " 
"We  need  not  accept  this  obiter  dichim  of 
Lord  Sherbrooke.  A  habit  of  reading  idly 
debilitates  and  corrupts  the  mind  for  all 
wholesome  reading ;  the  habit  of  read- 
ing wisely  is  one  of  the  most  difficult 
habits  to  acquire,  needing  strong  resolu- 
tion and  infinite  pains  ;  and  reading  for 
mere  reading's  sake,  instead  of  for  the 
sake  of  the  good  we  gain  from  reading, 
is  one  of  the  worst  and  commonest  and 
most  unwholesome  habits  we  have.  And 
so  our  inimitable  humourist  has  made 
delightful  fun  of  the  solid  books, — which 


lO  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

no  gentleman's  library  should  be  with- 
out,— the  Humes,  Gibbons,  Adam  Smiths, 
which,  he  says,  are  not  books  at  all,  and 
prefers  some  "kind-hearted  play-book," 
or  at  times  the  Town  and  County  Maga- 
zine. Poor  Lamb  has  not  a  little  to  an- 
swer for,  in  the  revived  relish  for  gar- 
bage unearthed  from  old  theatrical  dung- 
heaps.  Be  it  jest  or  earnest,  I  have 
little  patience  with  the  Elia-tic  philoso- 
phy of  the  frivolous.  Why  do  we  still 
suffer  the  traditional  hypocrisy  about 
the  dignity  of  literature — literature,  I 
mean,  in  the  gross,  which  includes  about 
equal  parts  of  what  is  useful  and  what  is 
useless?  Why  are  books  as  books,  wri- 
ters as  writers,  readers  as  readers,  meri- 
torious, apart  from  any  good  in  them, 
or  anything  that  we  can  get  from  them  ? 
Why  do  we  pride  ourselves  on  our 
powers  of  absorbing  print,  as  our  grand- 
fathers did  on  their  gifts  in  imbibing 
port,  when  we  know  that  there  is  a  mode 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  II 

of  absorbing  print,  which  makes  it  im- 
possible that  we  can  ever  learn  anything 
good  out  of  books  ? 

Our  stately  Milton  said  in  a  passage 
which  is  one  of  the  watchwords  of  the 
English  race,  "as  good  almost  kill  a 
Man  as  kill  a  good  Book."  But  has  he 
not  also  said  that  he  would  "have  a 
vigilant  eye  how  Bookes  demeane  them- 
selves, as  well  as  men  ;  and  do  sharpest 
justice  on  them  as  malefactors"?  .  .  . 
Yes  !  they  do  kill  the  good  book  who  de- 
liver up  their  few  and  precious  hours  of 
reading  to  the  trivial  book  ;  they  make 
it  dead  for  them  ;  they  do  what  lies  in 
them  to  destroy  "  the  precious  life-blood 
of  a  master-spirit,  imbalm'd  and  treas- 
ured up  on  purpose  to  a  life  beyond 
life  ;  "  they  "  spill  that  season'd  life  of 
man  preserv'd  and  stor'd  up  in  Bookes." 
For  in  the  wilderness  of  books  most  men, 
certainly  all  busy  men,  must  strictly 
choose.    If  they  saturate  their  minds  with 


"'  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

past  and  presenf  .  fi,  •   i-    "^^^^^  ^f  men 
Noughts  are  unveifed  toV     ';"'*''^'^'' 

TTp  t.      ^  ^^^^^^'  ^°to  a  corner 

payment  of  any  toll     Tn  L         '       ^® 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  1 3 

places  reserved.  Every  man  who  has 
written  a  book,  even  the  diligent  Mr. 
Whitaker,  is  in  one  sense  an  author ; 
"  a  book's  a  book  although  there's  no- 
thing in't ;"  and  every  man  who  can  de- 
cipher a  penny  journal  is  in  one  sense  a 
reader.  And  your  "general  reader," 
like  the  grave-digger  in  Hamlet,  is  hail- 
fellow  with  all  the  mighty  dead  ;  he  pats 
the  skull  of  the  jester  ;  batters  the  cheek 
of  lord,  lady,  or  courtier ;  and  uses 
"imperious  Caesar"  to  teach  boys  the 
Latin  declensions. 

But  this  noble  equality  of  all  writers — 
of  all  wTiters  and  of  all  readers — has  a 
perilous  side  to  it.  It  is  apt  to  make  us 
indiscriminate  in  the  books  we  read,  and 
somewhat  contemptuous  of  the  mighty 
men  of  the  past.  Men  who  are  most  ob- 
servant as  to  the  friends  they  make,  or 
the  conversation  they  share,  are  care- 
lessness itself  as  to  the  books  to  whom 
they  intrust  themselves,  and  the  printed 


14  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

language  with  which  they  saturate  their 
minds.  Yet  can  any  friendship  or  so- 
ciety be  more  important  to  us  than  that 
of  the  books  which  form  so  large  a  part 
of  our  minds  and  even  of  our  characters  ? 
Do  we  in  real  life  take  any  pleasant 
fellow  to  our  homes  and  chat  with  some 
agreeable  rascal  by  our  firesides,  we  who 
will  take  up  any  pleasant  fellow's  printed 
memoirs,  we  who  delight  in  the  agree- 
able rascal  when  he  is  cut  up  into  pages 
and  bound  in  calf  ? 

If  any  person  given  to  reading  were 
honestly  to  keep  a  register  of  all  the 
printed  stuff  that  he  or  she  consumes  in 
a  year — all  the  idle  tales  of  which  the 
very  names  and  the  story  are  forgotten 
in  a  week,  the  bookmaker's  prattle  about 
nothing  at  so  much  a  sheet,  the  fugitive 
trifling  about  silly  things  and  empty 
people,  the  memoirs  of  the  unmemorable, 
and  lives  of  those  who  never  really  lived 
at  all — of  what  a  mountain  of  rubbish 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  1$ 

would  it  be  the  catalogue  !  Exercises  for 
the  eye  and  the  memory,  as  mechanical 
as  if  we  set  ourselves  to  learn  the  names, 
ages,  and  family  histories  of  every  one 
who  lives  in  our  own  street,  the  flirta- 
tions of  their  maiden  aunts,  and  the  cir- 
cumstances surrounding  the  birth  of 
their  grandmother's  first  baby. 

It  is  impossible  to  give  any  method  to 
our  reading  till  we  get  nerve  enough  to 
reject.  The  most  exclusive  and  careful 
amongst  us  will  (in  literature)  take  boon 
companions  out  of  the  street,  as  easily  as 
an  idler  in  a  tavern.  ' '  I  came  across 
such  and  such  a  book  that  I  never  heard 
mentioned,"  says  one,  "and  found  it 
curious,  though  entirely  worthless."  "  I 
strayed  on  a  volume  by  I  know  not 
whom,  on  a  subject  for  which  I  never 
cared."  And  so  on.  There  are  curious 
and  worthless  creatures  enough  in  any 
pot-house  all  day  long  ;  and  there  is  in- 
cessant talk  in  omnibus,  train,  or  street 


1 6  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

by  we  know  not  whom,  about  we  care 
not  what.  Yet  if  a  printer  and  a  book- 
seller can  be  induced  to  make  this  gabble 
as  immortal  as  print  and  publication  can 
make  it,  then  it  straightway  is  literature, 
and  in  due  time  it  becomes  ' '  curious. " 

I  have  no  intention  to  moralise  or  to 
indulge  in  a  homily  against  the  reading 
of  what  is  deliberately  evil.  There  is 
not  so  much  need  for  this  now,  and  I 
am  not  discoursing  on  the  whole  duty  of 
man.  I  take  that  part  of  our  reading 
which  by  itself  is  no  doubt  harmless,  en- 
tertaining, and  even  gently  instructive. 
But  of  this  enormous  mass  of  literature 
how  much  deserves  to  be  chosen  out,  to 
be  preferred  to  all  the  great  books  of  the 
world,  to  be  set  apart  for  those  precious 
hours  which  are  all  that  the  most  of  us 
can  give  to  solid  reading  ?  The  vast  pro- 
portion of  books  are  books  that  we  shall 
never  be  able  to  read.  A  serious  per- 
centage of  books  are  not  worth  reading 


THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS.  \^ 

at  all.  The  really  vital  books  for  us  we 
also  know  to  be  a  very  trifling  portion  of 
the  whole.  And  yet  we  act  as  if  every 
book  were  as  good  as  any  other,  as  if  it 
were  merely  a  question  of  order  which 
we  take  up  first,  as  if  any  book  were 
good  enough  for  us,  and  as  if  all  were 
alike  honourable,  precious,  and  satisfy- 
ing. Alas  !  books  cannot  be  more  than 
the  men  who  write  them  ;  and  as  a  fair 
proportion  of  the  human  race  now  write 
books,  with  motives  and  objects  as 
various  as  human  activity,  books,  as 
books,  are  entitled  a  priori^  until  their 
value  is  proved,  to  the  same  attention 
and  respect  as  houses,  steam-engines, 
pictures,  fiddles,  bonnets,  and  other 
products  of  human  industry.  In  the 
shelves  of  those  libraries  which  are  our 
pride,  libraries  public  or  private,  circu- 
lating or  very  stationary,  are  to  be  found 
those  great  books  of  the  world  rari 
nantes  in   gurgite  vasto,   those    books 


1 8  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

which  are  truly  ' '  the  precious  life-blood 
of  a  master-spirit."  But  the  very  famil- 
iarity which  their  mighty  fame  has  bred 
in  us  makes  us  indifferent ;  we  grow 
weary  of  what  every  one  is  supposed  to 
have  read  ;  and  we  take  down  something 
which  looks  a  little  eccentric,  some 
worthless  book,  on  the  mere  ground  that 
we  never  heard  of  it  before. 

Thus  the  difficulties  of  literature  are 
in  their  way  as  great  as  those  of  the 
world,  the  obstacles  to  finding  the  right 
friends  are  as  great,  the  peril  is  as  great 
of  being  lost  in  a  Babel  of  voices  and  an 
ever-changing  mass  of  beings.  Books 
are  not  wiser  than  men,  the  true  books 
are  not  easier  to  find  than  the  true  men, 
the  bad  books  or  the  vulgar  books  are 
not  less  obtrusive  and  not  less  ubiquitous 
than  the  bad  or  vulgar  men  are  every- 
where; the  art  of  right  reading  is  as  long 
and  difficult  to  learn  as  the  art  of  riglit 
living.     Those  who  are  on  good  terms 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  1 9 

with  the  first  author  they  meet,  run  as 
much  risk  as  men  who  surrender  their 
time  to  the  first  passer  in  the  street ;  for 
to  be  open  to  every  book  is  for  the  most 
part  to  gain  as  little  as  possible  from 
any.  A  man  aimlessly  wandering  about 
in  a  crowded  city  is  of  all  men  the  most 
lonely ;  so  he  who  takes  up  only  the 
books  that  he  "comes  across"  is  pretty 
certain  to  meet  but  few  that  are  worth 
knowing. 

Now  this  danger  is  one  to  which  we 
are  specially  exposed  in  this  age.  Our 
high-pressure  life  of  emergencies,  our 
whirling  industrial  organisation  or  dis- 
organisation have  brought  us  in  this  (as 
in  most  things)  their  peculiar  diflSculties 
and  drawbacks.  In  almost  everything 
vast  opportunities  and  gigantic  means  of 
multiplying  our  products  bring  with 
them  new  perils  and  troubles  which  are 
often  at  first  neglected.  Our  huge  cities, 
where  wealth  is  piled  up  and  the  require- 


20  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

ments  and  appliances  of  life  extended 
beyond  the  dreams  of  our  forefathers, 
seem  to  breed  in  themselves  new  forms 
of  squalor,  disease,  blights,  or  risks  to 
life  such  as  we  are  yet  unable  to  master. 
So  the  enormous  multiplicity  of  modern 
books  is  not  altogether  favourable  to  the 
knowing  of  the  best.  I  listen  with 
mixed  satisfaction  to  the  paeans  that  they 
chant  over  the  works  which  issue  from 
the  press  each  day:  how  the  books  poured 
forth  from  Paternoster  Kow  might  in  a 
few  years  be  built  into  a  pyramid  that 
would  fill  the  dome  of  St.  Paul's.  How  in 
this  mountain  of  literature  am  I  to  find 
the  really  useful  book  ?  How,  when  I  have 
found  it,  and  found  its  value,  am  I  to 
get  others  to  read  it  ?  How  am  I  to  keep 
my  head  clear  in  the  torrent  and  din  of 
works,  all  of  which  distract  my  atten- 
tion, most  of  which  promise  me  some- 
thing, whilst  so  few  fulfil  that  promise  ? 
The  Nile  is  the  source  of  the  Egyptian's 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  21 

bread,  and  without  it  he  perishes  of 
hunger.  But  the  Nile  may  be  rather  too 
liberal  in  his  flood,  and  then  the  Egyp- 
tian runs  imminent  risk  of  drowning. 

And  thus  there  never  was  a  time,  at 
least  during  the  last  two  hundred  years, 
when  the  difficulties  in  the  way  of  mak- 
ing an  efficient  use  of  books  were  greater 
than  they  are  to-day,  when  the  obstacles 
were  more  real  between  readers  and  the 
right  books  to  read,  when  it  was  practi- 
cally so  troublesome  to  find  out  that 
which  it  is  of  vital  importance  to  know  ; 
and  that  not  by  the  dearth,  but  by  the 
plethora  of  printed  matter.  For  it  comes 
to  nearly  the  same  thing  whether  we  are 
actually  debarred  by  physical  impossibil- 
ity from  getting  the  right  book  into  our 
hand,  or  whether  we  are  choked  off  from 
the  right  book  by  the  obtrusive  crowd  of 
the  wrong  books  ;  so  that  it  needs  a  strong 
character  and  a  resolute  system  of  read- 
ing to  keep  the  head  cool  in  the  storm 


22  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

of  literature  around  us.  We  read  now- 
adays in  the  market-place — I  would 
rather  say  in  some  large  steam  factory  of 
letter-press,  where  damp  sheets  of  new 
print  whirl  round  us  perpetually — if  it 
be  not  rather  some  noisy  book-fair  where 
literary  showmen  tempt  us  with  perform- 
ing dolls,  and  the  gongs  of  rival  booths 
are  stunning  our  ears  from  morn  till 
night.  Contrast  with  this  pandemonium 
of  Leipsic  and  Paternoster  Row  the  sub- 
lime picture  of  our  Milton  in  his  early 
retirement  at  Horton,  when,  musing 
over  his  coming  flight  to  the  epic  heaven, 
practising  his  pinions,  as  he  tells  Diodati, 
he  consumed  five  years  of  solitude  in 
reading  the  ancient  writers — 

"  Et  totum  rapiunt  me,  mea  vita,  libri." 

Who  now  reads  the  ancient  writers? 
Who  systematically  reads  tlie  great  wri- 
ers,  be  they  ancient  or    modern,  whom 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  23 

the  consent  of  ages  has  marked  out 
as  classics  :  typical,  immortal,  peculiar 
teachers  of  our  race  ?  Alas  !  the  Para- 
dise Lost  is  lost  again  to  us  beneath  an 
inundation  of  graceful  academic  verse, 
sugary  stanzas  of  ladylike  prettiness, 
and  ceaseless  explanations  in  more  or 
less  readable  prose  of  what  John  Milton 
meant  or  did  not  mean,  or  what  he  saw 
or  did  not  see,  who  married  his  great- 
aunt,  and  why  Adam  or  Satan  is  like 
that,  or  unlike  the  other.  We  read  a 
perfect  library  about  the  Paradise  Lost, 
but  the  Paradise  Lost  itself  we  do  not 
read. 

I  am  not  presumptuous  enough  to 
assert  that  the  larger  part  of  modern 
literature  is  not  worth  reading  in  itself, 
that  the  prose  is  not  readable,  entertain- 
ing, one  may  say  highly  instructive. 
Nor  do  I  pretend  that  the  verses  which 
we  read  so  zealously  in  place  of  Milton's 
are  not  good  verses.     On  the  contrary, 


24  THE  CHOICE   OF  BOOKS. 

I  think  them  sweetly  conceived,  as  musi- 
cal and  as  graceful  as  the  verse  of  any 
age  in  our  history.  A  great  deal  of  our 
modern  literature  is  such  that  it  is  ex- 
ceedingly difficult  to  resist  it,  and  it  is 
undeniable  that  it  gives  us  real  informa- 
tion. It  seems  perhaps  unreasonable  to 
many  to  assert  that  a  decent  readable 
book  which  gives  us  actual  instruction 
can  be  otherwise  than  a  useful  com- 
panion and  a  solid  gain.  Possibly 
many  people  are  ready  to  cry  out  upon 
me  as  an  obscurantist  for  venturing  to 
doubt  a  genial  confidence  in  all  literature 
simply  as  such.  But  the  question  which 
weighs  upon  me  with  such  really  crush- 
ing urgency  is  this  :  What  are  the  books 
that  in  our  little  remnant  of  reading  time 
it  is  most  vital  for  us  to  know  ?  For  the 
true  use  of  books  is  of  such  sacred  value 
to  us  that  to  be  simply  entertained  is  to 
cease  to  be  taught,  elevated,  inspired  by 
books ;  merely  to  gather  information  of 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  2$ 

a  chance  kind  is  to  close  the  mind  to 
knowledge  of  the  urgent  kind. 

Every  book  that  we  take  up  without  a 
purpose  is  an  opportunity  lost  of  taking 
up  a  book  with  a  purpose — every  bit  of 
stray  information  which  we  cram  into 
our  heads  without  any  sense  of  its  im- 
portance, is  for  the  most  part  a  bit  of 
the  most  useful  information  driven  out 
of  our  heads  and  choked  off  from  our 
minds.  It  is  so  certain  that  informa- 
tion, i.e.  the  knowledge,  the  stored 
thoughts  and  observations  of  mankind, 
is  now  grown  to  proportions  so  utterly 
incalculable  and  prodigious,  that  even 
the  learned  whose  lives  are  given  to 
study  can  but  pick  up  some  crumbs  that 
fall  from  the  table  of  truth.  They  delve 
and  tend  but  a  plot  in  that  vast  and 
teeming  kingdom,  whilst  those  whom 
active  life  leaves  with  but  a  few  cramped 
hours  of  study  can  hardly  come  to  know 
the  very  vastness   of    the  field   before 


26  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

them,  or  how  infinitesimally  small  is  the 
corner  they  can  traverse  at  the  best. 
We  know  all  is  not  of  equal  value.  We 
know  that  books  differ  in  value  as  much 
as  diamonds  differ  from  the  sand  on  the 
seashore,  as  much  as  our  living  friend 
differs  from  a  dead  rat.  We  know  that 
much  in  the  myriad-peopled  world  of 
books — very  much  in  all  kinds — is  trivial, 
enervating,  inane,  even  noxious.  And 
thus,  where  we  have  infinite  opportuni- 
ties of  wasting  our  efforts  to  no  end,  of 
fatiguing  our  minds  without  enriching 
them,  of  clogging  the  spirit  without 
satisfying  it,  there,  I  cannot  but  think, 
the  very  infinity  of  opportunities  is  rob- 
bing us  of  the  actual  power  of  using 
them.  And  thus  I  come  often,  in  my 
less  hopeful  moods,  to  watch  the  re- 
morseless cataract  of  daily  literature 
which  thunders  over  the  remnants  of 
the  past,  as  if  it  were  a  fresh  impedi- 
ment to  the  men  of  our  day  in  the  way 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS  2/ 

of  systematic  knowledge  and  consistent 
powers  of  thought,  as  if  it  were  destined 
one  day  to  overwhelm  the  great  inheri- 
tance of  mankind  in  prose  and  verse. 

I  remember,  when  I  was  a  very  young 
man  at  college,  that  a  youth,  in  no 
spirit  of  paradox,  but  out  of  plenary 
conviction,  undertook  to  maintain  be- 
fore a  body  of  serious  students,  the 
astounding  proposition  that  the  inven- 
tion of  printing  had  been  one  of  the 
greatest  misfortunes  that  had  ever  be- 
fallen mankind.  He  argued  that  ex- 
clusive reliance  on  printed  matter  had 
destroyed  the  higher  method  of  oral 
teaching,  the  dissemination  of  thought 
by  the  spoken  word  to  the  attentive  ear. 
He  insisted  that  the  formation  of  a  vast 
literary  class  looking  to  the  making  of 
books  as  a  means  of  making  money, 
rather  than  as  a  social  duty,  had  multi- 
plied books  for  the  sake  of  the  writers 
rather  than  for  the  sake  of  the  readers; 


28  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

that  the  reliance  on  books  as  a  cheap 
and  common  resource  had  done  much  to 
weaken  the  powers  of  memory  ;  that  it 
destroyed  the  craving  for  a  general 
culture  of  taste,  and  the  need  of  artistic 
expression  in  all  the  surroundings  of 
life.  And  he  argued,  lastly,  that  the 
sudden  multiplication  of  all  kinds  of 
printed  matter  had  been  fatal  to  the 
orderly  arrangement  of  thought,  and 
had  hindered  a  system  of  knowledge 
and  a  scheme  of  education. 

I  am  far  from  sharing  this  immature 
view.  Of  course  I  hold  the  invention  of 
printing  to  have  been  one  of  the  most 
momentous  facts  in  the  whole  history 
of  man.  Without  it  universal  social 
progress,  true  democratic  enlightenment, 
and  the  education  of  the  people  would 
have  been  impossible,  or  very  slow,  even 
if  the  cultured  few,  as  is  likely,  could 
have  advanced  the  knowledge  of  man- 
kind without  it.     We  place  Gutemberg 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  2<) 

amongst  the  small  list  of  the  unique  and 
special  benefactors  of  mankind,  in  the 
sacred  choir  of  those  whose  work  trans- 
formed the  conditions  of  life,  whose  work, 
once  done,  could  never  be  repeated.  And 
no  doubt  the  things  which  our  ardent 
friend  regarded  as  so  fatal  a  disturbance 
of  society  were  all  inevitable  and  neces- 
sary, part  of  the  great  revolution  of  mind 
through  which  men  grew  out  of  the  me- 
diaeval incompleteness  to  a  richer  concep- 
tion of  life  and  of  the  world. 

Yet  there  is  a  sense  in  which  this  boy- 
ish anathema  against  printing  may  be- 
come true  to  us  by  our  own  fault.  "We 
may  create  for  ourselves  these  very  evils. 
For  the  art  of  printing  has  not  been  a 
gift  wholly  unmixed  with  evils  ;  it  must 
be  used  wisely  if  it  is  to  be  a  boon  to 
man  at  all ;  it  entails  on  us  heavy  re- 
sponsibilities, resolution  to  use  it  with 
judgment  and  self-control,  and  the  will 
to  resist  its  temptations  and  its  perils. 


30  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

Indeed,  we  may  easily  so  act  that  we 
may  make  it  a  clog  on  the  progress  of  the 
human  mind,  a  real  curse  and  not  a  boon. 
The  power  of  flying  at  will  through  space 
would  probably  extinguish  civilisation 
and  society,  for  it  would  release  us  from 
the  wholesome  bondage  of  place  and  rest. 
The  power  of  hearing  every  word  that 
had  ever  been  uttered  on  this  planet 
would  annihilate  thought,  as  the  power 
of  knowing  all  recorded  facts  by  the  pro- 
cess of  turning  a  handle  would  annihilate 
true  science.  Our  human  faculties  and 
our  mental  forces  are  not  enlarged  sim- 
ply by  multiplying  our  materials  of 
knowledge  and  our  facilities  for  commu- 
nication. Telephones,  microphones,  pan- 
toscopes,  steam-presses,  and  ubiquity-en- 
gines in  general  may,  after  all,  leave  the 
poor  human  brain  panting  and  throbbing 
under  the  strain  of  its  appliances,  no 
bigger  and  no  stronger  than  the  brains 
of  the  men  who  heard  Moses  speak,  and 


THE  CHulCE   OF  BOOKS.  3 1 

saw  Ai'istotle  and  Archimedes  pondering 
over  a  few  worn  rolls  of  crabbed  manu- 
script. Until  some  new  Gutemberg  or 
Watt  can  invent  a  machine  for  magnify- 
ing the  human  mind,  every  fresh  appa- 
ratus for  multiplying  its  work  is  a  fresh 
strain  on  the  mind,  a  new  realm  for  it 
to  order  and  to  rule. 

And  so,  I  say  it  most  confidently,  the 
first  intellectual  task  of  our  age  is  rightly 
to  order  and  make  serviceable  the  vast 
realm  of  printed  material  which  four  cen- 
turies have  swept  across  our  path.  To 
organise  our  knowledge,  to  systematise 
our  reading,  to  save,  out  of  the  relentless 
cataract  of  ink,  the  immortal  thoughts 
of  the  greatest — this  is  a  necessity,  un- 
less the  productive  ingenuity  of  man  is 
to  lead  us  at  last  to  a  measureless  and 
pathless  chaos.  To  know  anything  that 
turns  up  is,  in  the  infinity  of  knowledge, 
to  know  nothing.  To  read  the  first  book 
we  come  across,  in   the  wilderness  of 


32  THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS. 

books,  is  to  learn  notliing.  To  turn  over 
the  pages  of  ten  thousand  volumes  is  to 
be  practically  indiiferent  to  all  that  is 
good. 

But  this  warns  me  that  I  am  entering 
on  a  subject  which  is  far  too  big  and 
solemn.  It  is  plain  that  to  organise  our 
knowledge,  even  to  systematise  our  read- 
ing, to  make  a  working  selection  of  books 
for  general  study,  really  implies  a  com- 
plete scheme  of  education.  A  scheme  of 
education  ultimately  implies  a  system  of 
philosophy,  a  view  of  man's  duty  and 
powers  as  a  moral  and  social  being — a 
religion.  Before  a  problem  so  great  as 
this,  on  which  readers  have  such  different 
ideas  and  wants,  and  differ  so  profoundly 
on  the  very  premisses  from  which  we 
start,  before  such  a  problem  as  a  general 
theory  of  education,  I  prefer  to  pause.  I 
will  keep  silence  even  from  good  words. 
I  have  chosen  my  own  part,  and  adopted 
my  own  teacher.     But  to  ask  men  to 


THE   CHOICE   OF  BOOKS.  33 

adopt  the  education  of  Auguste  Comte, 
is  almost  to  ask  them  to  adopt  Positivism 
itself. 

Nor  will  I  enlarge  on  the  matter  for 
thought,  for  foreboding,  almost  for  de- 
spair, that  is  presented  to  us  by  the  fact 
of  our  familiar  literary  ways  and  our  re- 
cognised literary  profession.  That  things 
infinitely  trifling  in  themselves :  men, 
events,  societies,  phenomena,  in  no  way 
otherwise  more  valuable  than  the  mjTiad 
other  things  which  flit  around  us  like  the 
sparrows  on  the  housetop,  should  be 
glorified,  magnified,  and  perpetuated,  set 
under  a  literary  microscope  and  f  ocussed 
in  the  blaze  of  a  literary  magic-lantern — 
not  for  what  they  are  in  themselves,  but 
solely  to  amuse  and  excite  the  world  by 
showing  how  it  can  be  done — all  this  is 
to  me  so  amazing,  so  heart-breaking,  that 
I  forbear  now  to  treat  it,  as  I  cannot  say 
all  that  I  would. 

The  Choice  of  Books  is  really  the  choice 


34  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

of  our  education,  of  a  moral  and  intel- 
lectual ideal,  of  the  whole  duty  of  man. 
But  though  I  shrink  from  any  so  high  a 
theme,  a  few  words  are  needed  to  indi- 
cate my  general  point  of  view  in  the 
matter. 

In  the  first  place,  when  we  speak  about 
books,  let  us  avoid  the  extravagance  of 
expecting  too  much  from  books,  the 
pedant's  habit  of  extolling  books  as  sy- 
nonymous with  education.  Books  are  no 
more  education  than  laws  are  virtue  ;  and 
just  as  profligacy  is  easy  within  the  strict 
limits  of  law,  a  boundless  knowledge  of 
books  may  be  found  with  a  narrow  edu- 
cation. A  man  may  be,  as  the  poet 
saith,  "  deep  vers'd  in  books,  and  shallow 
in  himself."  We  need  to  know  in  order 
that  we  may  feel  rightly  and  act  wisely. 
The  thirst  after  truth  itself  may  be 
pushed  to  a  degree  where  indulgence  en- 
feebles our  sympathies  and  unnerves  us 
in  action.     Of  all  men  perhaps  the  book- 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  35 

lover  needs  most  to  be  reminded  that 
man's  business  here  is  to  know  for  the 
sake  of  living,  not  to  live  for  the  sake  of 
knowing. 

A  healthy  mode  of  reading  would  fol- 
low the  lines  of  a  sound  education.  And 
the  first  canon  of  a  sound  education  is  to 
make  it  the  instrument  to  perfect  the 
whole  nature  and  character.  Its  aims 
are  comprehensive,  not  special ;  they  re- 
gard life  as  a  whole,  not  mental  curi- 
osity; they  have  to  give  us,  not  so  much 
materials,  as  capacities.  So  that,  how- 
ever moderate  and  limited  the  opportu- 
nity for  education,  in  its  way  it  should 
be  always  more  or  less  symmetrical  and 
balanced,  appealing  equally  in  turn  to 
the  three  grand  intellectual  elements — 
imagination,  memory,  reflection  :  and  so 
having  something  to  give  us  in  poetry, 
in  history,  in  science,  and  in  philoso- 
phy. 

And  thus  our  reading  will  be  sadly 


36  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

one-sided,  however  voluminous  it  be,  if 
it  entirely  close  to  us  any  of  the  great 
types  and  ideals  which  the  creative  in- 
stinct of  man  has  produced,  if  it  shut 
out  from  us  either  the  ancient  world, 
or  other  European  poetry,  as  important 
almost  as  our  own.  When  our  reading, 
however  deep,  runs  wholly  into  ' '  pockets, " 
and  exhausts  itself  in  the  literature  of 
one  age,  one  country,  one  type,  then  we 
may  be  sure  that  it  is  tending  to  narrow 
or  deform  our  minds.  And  the  more  it 
leads  us  into  curious  by^^ays  and  nur- 
tures us  into  indifference  for  the  beaten 
highways  of  the  world,  the  sooner  we 
shall  end,  if  we  be  not  specialists  and 
students  by  profession,  in  ceasing  to 
treat  our  books  as  the  companions  and 
solace  of  our  lifetime,  and  in  using  them 
as  the  instruments  of  a  refined  sort  of 
self-indulgence. 

A  wise   education,   and   so  Judicious 
reading,  should  leave  no  great  type  of 


THE   CHOICE   OF  BOOKS.  yj 

thought,  no  dominant  phase  of  human 
nature,  wholly  a  blank.  "Whether  our 
reading  be  great  or  small,  so  far  as  it 
goes,  it  should  be  general.  If  our  lives 
admit  of  but  a  short  space  for  reading, 
all  the  more  reason  that,  so  far  as  may 
be,  it  should  remind  us  of  the  vast  ex- 
panse of  human  thought,  and  the  won- 
derful variety  of  human  nature.  To 
read,  and  yet  so  to  read,  that  we  see 
nothing  but  a  corner  of  literature,  the 
loose  fringe,  or  flats  and  wastes  of  letters, 
and  by  reading  only  deepen  our  natural 
belief  that  this  island  is  the  hub  of  the 
universe,  and  the  nineteenth  century  the 
only  age  worth  notice,  all  this  is  really 
to  call  in  the  aid  of  books  to  thicken  and 
harden  our  untaught  prejudices.  Be  it 
imagination,  memory,  or  reflection  that 
we  address — that  is,  in  poetry,  history, 
science,  or  philosophy,  our  first  duty  is  to 
aim  at  knowing  something  at  least  of  the 
best,  at  getting  some  definite  idea  of  the 


38  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

mighty  realm  whose  outer  rim  we  are 
permitted  to  approach. 

But  how  are  we  to  know  the  best ;  how 
are  we  to  gain  this  definite  idea  of  the 
vast  world  of  letters?  There  are  some 
who  appear  to  suppose  that  the  "best" 
are  known  only  to  experts  in  an  esoteric 
way,  who  may  reveal  to  inquirers  what 
schoolboys  and  betting-men  describe  as 
"tips."  There  are  no  "tips"  in  litera- 
ture ;  the  "  best "  authors  are  never  dark 
horses;  we  need  no  "crammers"  and 
"  coaches  "  to  thrust  us  into  the  presence 
of  the  great  writers  of  all  time.  ' '  Cram- 
mers "  will  only  lead  us  wrong.  It  is  a 
thing  far  easier  and  more  common  than 
many  imagine,  to  discover  the  best.  It 
needs  no  research,  no  learning,  and  is 
only  misguided  by  recondite  information. 
The  world  has  long  ago  closed  the  great 
assize  of  letters,  and  judged  the  first 
places  everywhere.  In  such  a  matter 
the  judgment  of  the  world,  guided  and 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  39 

informed  by  a  long  succession  of  accom- 
plished critics,  is  almost  unerring.  When 
some  Zoilus  finds  blemishes  in  Homer, 
and  prefers,  it  may  be,  the  work  of  some 
Apollonius  of  his  own  discovering,  we 
only  laugh.  There  may  be  doubts  about 
the  third  and  the  fourth  rank  ;  but  the 
first  and  the  second  are  hardly  open  to 
discussion.  The  gates  which  lead  to  the 
Elysian  fields  may  slowly  wheel  back  on 
their  adamantine  hinges  to  admit  now 
and  then  some  new  and  chosen  modern. 
But  the  company  of  the  masters  of  those 
w^ho  know,  and  in  especial  degree  of  the 
great  poets,  is  a  roll  long  closed  and 
complete,  and  they  who  are  of  it  hold 
ever  peaceful  converse  together. 

Hence  we  may  find  it  a  useful  maxim 
that,  if  our  reading  be  utterly  closed  to 
the  great  poems  of  the  world,  there  is 
something  amiss  with  our  reading.  If 
you  find  Milton,  Dante,  Calderon,  Goethe, 
so  much   "Hebrew-Greek"  to  you;    if 


40  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

your  Homer  and  Virgil,  your  Moliere 
and  Scott,  rest  year  after  year  undis- 
turbed on  their  shelves  beside  your  school 
trigonometry  and  your  old  college  text- 
books ;  if  you  have  never  opened  the 
Cid^  the  Ntbelungen,  Crusoe^  and  Bon 
Quixote  since  you  were  a  boy,  and  are 
wont  to  leave  the  Bible  and  the  Imita- 
tion for  some  wet  Sunday  afternoon — 
know,  friend,  that  your  reading  can  do 
you  little  real  good.  Your  mental  di- 
gestion is  ruined  or  sadly  out  of  order. 
No  doubt,  to  thousands  of  intelligent  edu- 
cated men  who  call  themselves  readers, 
the  reading  through  a  Canto  of  The  Par- 
gatorio,  or  a  Book  of  the  Paradise  Lost, 
is  a  task  as  irksome  as  it  would  be  to 
decipher  an  ill-written  manuscript  in  a 
language  that  is  almost  forgotten.  But, 
although  we  are  not  to  be  always  reading 
epics,  and  are  chiefly  in  the  mood  for 
slighter  things,  to  be  absolutely  unable 
to  read  Milton  or  Dante  with  enjoyment. 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  4 1 

is  to  be  in  a  very  bad  way.  Aristophanes, 
Theocritus,  Boccaccio,  Cervantes,  Moliere 
are  often  as  light  as  the  driven  foam  ; 
but  they  are  not  light  enough  for  the 
general  reader.  Their  humour  is  too 
bright  and  lovely  for  the  groundlings. 
They  are,  alas!  "classics,"  somewhat 
apart  from  our  everyday  ways  ;  they  are 
not  banal  enough  for  us  ;  and  so  for  us 
they  slumber  "unknown  in  a  long  night," 
just  because  they  are  immortal  poets,  and 
are  not  scribblers  of  to-day. 

When  will  men  understand  that  the 
reading  of  great  books  is  a  faculty  to  be 
acquired,  not  a  natural  gift,  at  least  not 
to  those  who  are  spoiled  by  our  current 
education  and  habits  of  life  ?  Ceci  tuera 
cela,  the  last  great  poet  might  have  said 
of  the  first  circulating  library.  An  in- 
satiable appetite  for  new  novels  makes  it 
as  hard  to  read  a  masterj^iece  as  it 
seems  to  a  Parisian  boulevardier  to  live 
in  a  quiet  country.     Until  a  man  can 


42  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

truly  enjoy  a  draft  of  clear  water  bub- 
bling from  a  mountain  side,  his  taste  is 
in  an  unwholesome  state.  And  so  he 
who  finds  the  Heliconian  spring  insipid 
should  look  to  the  state  of  his  nerves. 
Putting  aside  the  iced  air  of  the  difficult 
mountain  tops  of  epic,  tragedy,  or  psalm, 
there  are  some  simple  pieces  which  may 
serve  as  an  unerring  test  of  a  healthy  or 
a  vicious  taste  for  imaginative  work.  If 
the  Cidy  the  Vita  Nuova,  the  Canter- 
hury  Tales,  Shakespeare's  Sonnets,  and 
Lycidas  pall  on  a  man  ;  if  he  care  not 
for  Malory's  Morte  d''ArtTinr  and  the 
Red  Cross  Kniglit ;  if  he  thinks  Crusoe 
and  the  Vicar  books  for  the  young  ;  if  he 
thrill  not  with  The  Ode  to  the  West 
Wind,  and  The  Ode  to  a  Grecian  TJrn ; 
if  he  have  no  stomach  for  Christabel  or 
the  lines  written  on  TJie  Wye  above  Tin- 
tern  Abbey,  he  should  fall  on  his  knees 
and  pray  for  a  cleanlier  and  quieter 
spirit. 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  43 

The  intellectual  system  of  most  of  us 
in  these  days  needs  "to  purge  and  to 
live  cleanly."  Only  by  a  course  of  treat- 
ment shall  we  bring  our  minds  to  feel  at 
peace  with  the  grand  pure  works  of  the 
world.  Something  we  ought  all  to  know 
of  the  masterpieces  of  antiquity,  and  of 
the  other  nations  of  Europe.  To  under- 
stand a  great  national  poet,  such  as 
Dante,  Calderon,  Corneille,  or  Goethe, 
is  to  know  other  types  of  human  civilisa- 
tion in  ways  which  a  library  of  histories 
does  not  sufficiently  teach.  The  great 
masterpieces  of  the  world  are  thus,  quite 
apart  from  the  charm  and  solace  they 
give  us,  the  master  instruments  of  a 
solid  education. 


44  THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS. 


CHAPTER  II. 

POETS  OF  THE  OLD  WORLD. 

I  PASS  from  all  systems  of  education — 
from  thought  of  social  duty,  from  medi- 
tation on  the  profession  of  letters — to 
more  general  aud  lighter  topics.  I  will 
deal  now  only  with  the  easier  side  of 
reading,  with  matter  on  which  there  is 
some  common  agreement  in  the  world. 
I  am  very  far  from  meaning  that  our 
whole  time  spent  with  books  is  to  be 
given  to  study.  Far  from  it.  I  put  the 
poetic  and  emotional  side  of  literature 
as  the  most  needed  for  daily  use.  I  take 
the  books  that  seek  to  rouse  the  imagi- 
nation, to  stir  up  feeling,  touch  the  heart 
— the  books  of  art,  of  fancy,  of  ideals, 
such  as  reflect  the  delight  and  aroma  of 
life.    And  here  how  does  the  trivial, 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  45 

provided  it  is  the  new,  that  which  stares 
at  us  in  the  advertising  columns  of  the 
day,  crowd  out  the  immortal  poetry  and 
pathos  of  the  human  race,  vitiating  our 
taste  for  those  exquisite  pieces  which  are 
a  household  word,  and  weakening  our 
mental  relish  for  the  eternal  works  of 
genius !  Old  Homer  is  the  very  foun- 
tain-head of  pure  poetic  enjoyment,  of 
all  that  is  spontaneous,  simple,  native, 
and  dignified  in  life.  He  takes  us  into 
the  ambrosial  world  of  heroes,  of  human 
vigour,  of  purity,  of  grace.  He  is  the 
eternal  type  of  the  poet.  In  him,  alone 
of  the  poets,  a  national  life  is  trans- 
figured, wholly  beautiful,  complete,  and 
happy:  where  care,  doubt,  decay  are  as 
yet  unborn.  Here  is  the  secular  Eden  of 
the  natural  man — man  not  yet  fallen  or 
ashamed.  All  later  poetry  paints  an 
ideal  world,  conceived  by  a  sustained 
effort  of  invention.  Homer  paints  a 
world  which  he  saw. 


46  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

Most  men  and  women  can  say  that 
they  have  read  Homer,  just  as  most  of 
us  can  say  that  we  have  studied  John- 
son's Dictionary.  But  how  few  of  us 
take  him  up,  time  after  time,  with  fresh 
delight !  How  few  have  even  read  the 
entire  Iliad  and  Odyssey  through ! 
Whether  in  the  resounding  lines  of  the 
old  Greek,  as  fresh  and  ever-stirring  as 
the  waves  that  tumble  on  the  seashore, 
filling  the  soul  with  satisfying  silent 
wonder  at  its  restless  unison  ;  whether  in 
the  quaint  lines  of  Chapman,  or  the 
clarion  couplets  of  Pope,  or  the  closer 
versions  of  Cowper,  Lord  Derby,  of 
Philip  Worsley,  or  in  the  new  prose  ver^ 
sion.  Homer  is  always  fresh  and  rich.* 

*  Homer  has  exercised  a  greater  variety 
of  translators  than  any  other  author  what- 
ever. Of  them  all  I  prefer  Lord  Derby's 
Iliad,  and  Philip  Worsley's  Odyssey. 
Children  usually  begin  their  Homer  through 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  4/ 

And  yet  how  seldom  does  one  find  a 
friend  spellbound  over  the  Greek  Bible 
of  antiquity,  whilst  they  wade  through 
torrents  of  magazine  quotations  from  a 
petty  versifier  of  to-day,  and  in  an  idle 
vacation  will  graze,  as  contentedly  as 
cattle  in  a  fresh  meadow,  throug^h  the 


Pope,  which  has  certainly  the  ring  and 
fire  of  a  poem,  though  it  is  not  Homer's. 
Lord  Derby  preserves  something  of  the 
dignity  of  the  Iliad,  which  is  essential  to 
it ;  and  Worsley  preserves  much  of  the 
fairy-tale  charm  of  the  Odyssey.  His  Iliad, 
completed  by  Conington,  is  almost  a  mis- 
take. Chapman,  poet  as  he  is,  is  rather 
archaic  for  ordinary  readers,  and  too  loose 
for  scholarly  readers.  Cowper  is  rather 
monotonous.  The  rest  are  rather  experi- 
ments than  results.  To  English  hexame- 
ters there  are  euphonic  obstacles  which 
seem  to  be  insuperable.  The  first  line  of 
the  Iliad  has  thirty  letters,  of  which  twelve 


48  THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS. 

chopped  straw  of  a  circulating  library. 
A  generation  which  will  listen  to  Pina- 
fore for  three  hundred  nights,  and  will 
read  M.  Zola's  seventeenth  romance, 
can  no  more  read  Homer  than  it  could 
read  a  cuneiform  inscription.  It  will  read 
about  Homer  just  as  it  will  read  about  a 

only  are  consonants.  The  first  line  of 
Evangeline  has  fifty-four  letters,  of  which 
thirty-six  are  consonants.  Thus,  whilst  a 
Greek  in  pronouncing  his  hexameter  has 
twelve  hard  sounds  to  form,  the  English- 
man has  thirty-six,  or  exactly  three  times 
as  many. 

Of  the  prose  translations,  that  of  Mr. 
Andrew  Lang  and  his  friends  is  as  perfect 
as  prose  translation  of  verse  can  be.  It 
necessarily  loses  the  movement,  the  lilt, 
and  the  subtle  charm  of  the  verse.  Flax- 
man's  designs  will  be  of  great  help  in  en- 
joying Homer,  and  also  what  E.  Coleridge, 
Grote,  Gladstone,  M.  Arnold,  and  Symonds 
have  written. 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  49 

cuneiform  inscription,  and  will  crowd  to 
see  a  few  pots  which  probably  came  from 
the  neighbourhood  of  Troy.  But  to 
Homer  and  the  primeval  type  of  heroic 
man  in  his  simple  joyousness  the  cul- 
tured generation  is  really  dead,  as  com- 
pletely as  some  spoiled  beauty  of  the 
ballroom  is  blind  to  the  bloom  of  the 
heather  or  the  waving  of  the  daffodils  in 
a  glade. 

It  is  a  true  psychological  problem,  this 
nausea  which  idle  culture  seems  to  pro- 
duce for  all  that  is  manly  and  pure  in 
heroic  poetry.  One  knows — at  least 
every  schoolboy  has  known— that  a  pas- 
sage of  Homer,  rolling  along  in  the  hex- 
ameter or  trumpeted  out  by  Pope,  will 
give  one  a  hot  glow  of  pleasure  and  raise 
a  finer  throb  in  the  pulse  ;  one  knows 
that  Homer  is  the  easiest,  most  artless, 
most  diverting  of  all  poets  ;  that  the  fif-  / 
tieth  reading  rouses  the  spirit  even  more  / 
than  the  first — and  yet  we  find  ourselves 


50  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

(we  are  all  alike)  painfully  pshawing 
over  some  new  and  uncut  barley-sugar 
in  rhyme,  which  a  man  in  the  street 
asked  us  if  we  had  read,  or  it  may  be 
some  learned  lucubration  about  the  site 
of  Troy  by  some  one  we  chanced  to  meet 
at  dinner.  It  is  an  unwritten  chapter  in 
the  history  of  the  human  mind,  how  this 
literary  prurience  after  new  print  un- 
mans us  for  the  enjoyment  of  the  old 
songs  chanted  forth  in  the  sunrise  of 
human  imagination.  To  ask  a  man  or 
woman  who  spends  half  a  lifetime  in 
sucking  magazines  and  new  poems  to 
read  a  book  of  Homer,  would  be  like 
asking  a  butcher's  boy  to  whistle  "  Ade- 
laida."  The  noises  and  sights  and  talk, 
the  whirl  and  volatility  of  life  around 
us,  are  too  strong  for  us.  A  society 
which  is  for  ever  gossiping  in  a  sort  of 
perpetual  "  drum"  loses  the  very  faculty 
of  caring  for  anything  but  "  early  copies  " 
and  the  last  tale  out.     Thus,   like  the 


THE  CHOICE   OF  BOOKS.  5 1 

tares  in  the  noble  parable  of  the  Sower, 
a  perpetual  chatter  about  books  chokes 
the  seed  which  is  sown  in  the  greatest 
books  of  the  world. 

I  speak  of  Homer,  but  fifty  other  great 
poets  and  creators  of  eternal  beauty- 
would  serve  my  argument.  What  Homer 
is  to  epic,  that  is  ^^schylus  to  the  tragic 
art — the  first  immortal  type.  In  majesty 
and  mass  of  pathos  the  Agamemnon  re- 
mains still  without  a  rival  in  tragedy. 
The  universality  and  inexhaustible  versa- 
tility of  our  own  Shakespeare  are  unique 
in  all  literature.  But  the  very  richness 
of  his  qualities  detracts  from  the  symme- 
try and  directness  of  the  dramatic  impres- 
sion. For  this  reason  neither  is  Lear, 
nor  Othello,  nor  Macbeth,  nor  Hamlet 
(each  supreme  as  an  imaginative  crea- 
tion) so  typically  perfect  a  tragedy  as 
the  Agamemnon,  In  each  of  the  four 
there  are  slight  incidents  which  we  could 
spare  without   any  evident    loss.     The 


52  THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS. 

Agamemnon  alone  of  tragedies  has  the 
absolute  perfection  of  a  statue  by  Phei- 
dias.  The  intense  crescendo  of  the  ca- 
tastrophe, the  absolute  concentration  of 
interest,  the  statuesque  unity  of  the 
grouping,  the  mysterious  halo  of  religion 
with  which  the  ancient  legend  sanctified 
the  drama,  are  qualities  denied  to  any 
modern.! 

!  Of  all  the  translations  of  the  Agamem- 
non, I  prefer  that  of  Mr.  E.  D.  A.  Mors- 
head,  which  seems  to  me  by  its  union  of 
accurate  version  with  poetic  vigour  to  stand 
in  the  front  rank  of  English  verse  transla- 
tion. Milman's  version  is  the  work  of  a 
poet,  but  not  so  completely  master  of  the 
Greek  ;  Mr.  R.  Browning's  is  also  the  work 
of  a  poet  and  a  scholar,  but  its  uncouth- 
ness  is  not  the  rugged  majesty  of  ^Eschy- 
lus.  The  Agamemnon  is  at  times  stormy 
in  diction  ;  it  is  never  queer.  Miss  Swan- 
wick's  beautiful  translation  has  been  pub- 
lished with  Flaxman's  designs.     If  Flax- 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  53 

If  the  seven  surviving  dramas  of 
^schylus  had  followed  into  black  night 
the  other  sixty-three,  which  we  have  lost, 
we  should  probably  regard  (Edipus  the 
King  of  Sophocles  as  the  type  of  the 
pure  drama.  And,  in  the  exquisite  ten- 
derness and  nobility  of  soul  of  the  Anti- 
gone and  the  (Edipus  at  Colonus,  Sopho- 
cles reaches  a  note  of  pathos,  wherein 
^schylus  himself  had  inferior,  and 
Shakespeare  alone  an  equal  mastery.^ 
So,  too,  in  comedy,  Aristophanes  is  the 

man's  genius  is  not  so  much  in  harmony 
with  iEschylus  as  with  Homer,  he  is  quite 
at  his  best  in  the  Agamemnon. 

1  Mr.  E.  D.  A.  Morshead  has  been  as  suc- 
cessful with  the  (Edipus  King  of  Sopho- 
cles as  with  the  Trilogy  of  ^schylus.  Pro- 
fessor Lewis  Campbell's  translation  of 
Sophocles  is  most  elegant  and,  with  the 
accuracy  of  a  scholar,  gives  us  something 
of  the  grace  and  lyric  charm  of  Sophocles. 


54  THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS. 

eternal  type.  Inexhaustible  fancy,  the 
wildest  humour,  the  keenest  wit,  the 
subtlest  eye  for  character,  combine  in 
him  with  perennial  inventiveness  and 
exquisite  melody.  Demagogy,  Presump- 
tion, Pedantry,  every  phase  of  extrava- 
gance and  affectation,  pass  in  turns 
across  a  stage  which  reaches  from  bois- 
terous farce  to  splendid  lyric  poetry. 
The  Phallic  license  of  this  ungovernable 
jester — a  license  without  limit  and,  in 
familiar  literature,  without  a  match,  is 
less  a  matter  of  vice  or  obscenity,  than 
of  social,  local,  and  even  religious  con- 
vention.' 


'  It  is  singular  that  of  this  poet,  in  many 
respects  the  most  Shakespearean  of  all  the 
ancients,  some  of  the  best  translations  exist. 
Together  they  undoubtedly  enable  us  to 
enter  into  the  true  Aristophanic  spirit. 
The  free  version  of  Hookbam  Frere  is 
almost  as  good  as  any  translation  in  verse 


THE  CHOICT^,  OF  BOOKS.  55 

Greece  gave  us  the  model  and  eternal 
type  of  written  language,  not  only  in 
epic,  tragic,  and  comic  poetry,  but  in 
imaginative  prose,  and  in  pure  lyric. 
We  come  upon  those  marvellous  frag- 
ments of  Alcman,  Alcaeus,  Sappho,  and 
Tyrtseus,  rescued  for  us  by  the  diligent 
love  of  scholars,  with  the  same  sense  of 
acute  regret  that  we  first  see  some  head, 
trunk,  or  limb  of  the  golden  age  of  Greek 
sculpture  unearthed  from  beneath  a  pile 

of  an  untranslatable  ancient  can  be.  Those 
of  Cumberland  and  T.  Mitchell  have  spirit, 
and  the  recent  versions  by  B.  B.  Rogers 
have  accuracy  as  well  as  spirit.  Altogether 
we  have  an  adequate  rendering  of  sojne 
eight  or  nine  of  these  masterpieces.  One 
who  will  read  the  commentaries  of  Mitchell, 
Frere,  Rogers,  and  the  illustrations  given 
us  by  Symonds  and  Mahaffy  will  get  a  liv- 
ing idea  of  this,  the  older  comedy,  the 
most  amazing  avatar  of  the  pure  Attic 
genius. 


56  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

of  rubbish.  The  history  of  mankind  re- 
cords few  such  irreparable  losses  as  the 
lyrics  of  Greece,  of  which  almost  every 
line  that  is  saved  seems  a  faultless 
gem  of  art.  It  gives  us  a  striking  im- 
pression of  the  poetic  fertility  of  Greece, 
when  we  remember  that,  from  Homer 
to  Longus,  we  have  at  least  thirteen  cen- 
turies of  almost  unbroken  productive- 
ness. No  other  literature  has  any  con- 
tinuous record  so  vast,  nor  any  other  lan- 
guage such  an  unbroken  life.'    Here,  as 

1  Of  Pindar  and  Theocritus  we  now  pos- 
sess prose  versions,  as  perfect,  I  believe,  as 
any  prose  version  of  a  poet  can  be.  Mr. 
E.  Myers'  recent  translation  of  Pindar,  and 
Mr.  Lang's  translation  of  Theocritus,  Bion, 
and  Moschus,  preserve  for  us  something 
even  of  the  form  of  the  original.  I  am 
wont  to  look  on  Mr.  Lang's  Theocritus,  in 
particular,  as  a  tour-de-force  in  translation 
at  present  without  a  rival.     He  has  caught. 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  57 

elsewhere  and  so  often,  Mr.  Symonds  is  an 
unerring  guide  ;  and  they  who  will  study 
with  care  his  versions  and  illustrations 
may  at  least  come  to  know  how  great  is 
our  loss  in    the    disappearance  of  the 

although  using  prose,  the  music  and  lilt  of 
the  Greek  verse.  His  version  of  the  Phar- 
maceutria,  of  the  Epithalamium,  of  the 
Adonis,  suggests  a  metrical  melody  as 
plainly  as  does  the  English  version  of  the 
Psalms.  The  excellent  translation  in  verse 
by  Mr.  C.  S.  Calverley  does  not  retain  the 
music  at  all.  Nor  can  I  read  patiently  the 
verse  translations  of  Pindar.  There  is  no 
complete  English  version  of  the  Poetse 
Lyrici  of  Greece  ;  but  there  are  translations 
of  some  beautiful  Fragments  by  Frere, 
Dean  Milman,  Lord  Derby,  J.  A.  Symonds, 
father  and  son.  Professor  Conington,  and 
many  others.  Those  of  Milman  can  almost 
be  read  as  poetry.  The  immortal  Frag- 
ments of  Sappho  have  exercised  the  art 
of  a  long  line  of  translators  from  Catullus 


58  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

works  of  which  these  are  but  the  rem- 
nant and  the  fragments.  One  of  the 
most  perfect  of  all  translations  is  the 
quaint  version  of  the  Daphnis  and  Chloe 
of  Longus,  by  old  Amyot,  improved  by 
P.  L.  Courier.     It  is  amongst  the  prob- 

to  Rossetti  and  Mr.  Symonds — all,  alas  ! 
in  vain.  The  greatest  recorded  genius 
amongst  women  has  left  us  those  dazzling 
lines,  which  of  all  human  poetry  have 
been  the  most  intensely  searched,  the  most 
fondly  remembered.  But  they  remain  es- 
sentially Greek  ;  no  other  tongue  can  tell 
their  fiery  tale. 

Chapman  has  given  us  Hesiod  as  well  as 
Homer,  and  Marlowe  and  Chapman  a  vari- 
ation on  Musseus.  Frere  has  attempted  to 
recall  Theognis  to  life.  But  the  metrical 
versions  of  these  Greek  lyrics,  the  most 
exquisitely  artless,  and  yet  the  most  magi- 
cally graceful  in  the  world,  are  little  more, 
at  the  best,  than  scholarly  exercises  of  a 
learned  leisure, 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  59 

lems  of  history  that  this  most  Pagan, 
most  Hellenic,  and  most  romantic  of 
pastorals,  was  contemporary  with  the 
"  City  of  God  ; "  was  composed  at  a  time 
when  Christianity  had  long  been  the 
official  religion  of  Greece,  when  Chris- 
tendom was  torn  into  segments  by  rival 
heresies  and  sects,  and  when  the  warlike 
barbarians  of  the  North  had  already 
plunged  into  chaos  large  portions  of  the 
Empire.  The  Hellenic  genius  of  beauty, 
after  twelve  centuries  of  incessant  en- 
ergy, may  be  heard  in  this,  its  last  song  ; 
unheeding  revolutions  and  battles  alike 
in  thought,  in  society,  and  in  life. 

Passing  from  Greece  to  Italy,  there 
is  a  great  poetic  void.  There  is  no  Eo- 
man  Homer.  Such  Hiad  as  Rome  has, 
must  be  sought  for  in  Livy.  The  legends 
and  lays  which  he  built  into  the  founda- 
tions of  his  resplendent  story  remain  still 
traceable,  just  as,  on  the  Capitol  hill  to 
this  day,  we  see  masses  of  peperino  and 


6o  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS, 

red  tufa,  where  the  Tabularium  serves 
as  basement  to  the  Kenaissance  Palace 
which  Michael  Angel  3  raised  for  the 
Senator.  That  great  imperial  race  did 
not  embody  its  life  as  a  whole  in  any- 
national  poem.  The  JEneid  of  Virgil 
was  the  almost  academic  equivalent  of  a 
national  epic.  It  bears  to  the  Iliad  some 
such  relation  as  the  Polyeiicte  of  Cor- 
n^ille  bears  to  the  Agamemnon  of 
^schylus.  Yet  so  touching  are  its  epi- 
sodes, so  heroic  its  plan  and  conception, 
so  consummate  the  form,  so  profound 
its  influence  over  later  generations  of 
men,  that  it  must  for  ever  hold  a  place 
iivthe  eternal  poetry  of  mankind.' 


^  The  translation  of  Virgil  is  a  problem 
even  more  perplexing  than  that  of  Homer. 
Glorious  John  treated  his  epic  with  even 
less  regard  for  the  original  than  Pope,  and 
with  far  less  grace  and  dignity.  The 
-^neid   is    hardly  tolerable    in   the    racy 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  01 

The  other  poetry  of  Rome  is  chiefly 
didactic,  moral,  or  social.  Rome  has  no 
tragedy  except  in  her  history,  no  comedy 
that  is  not  more  than  half  Greek.  Hor- 
ace, Ovid,  Catullus,  we  read  for  their 
inimitable  witchery  of  phrase  ;  Juvenal, 
Plautus,  and  Terence,  we  read  for  their 
insight  into  men  ;  Lucretius  for  his  won- 
derful force  of  meditation,  so  strangely 
in  anticipation  of  modern  thought.    But 

couplets  which  give  point  to  Absalom 
and  Achitophel.  Mr.  Conington's  attempt 
to  turn  the  ^neid  into  the  rhyme  of  Mar- 
mion  is  a  sad  waste  of  ingenuity  ;  nor  does 
Mr.  Morris  mend  matters  by  turning  it  into 
a  "marry-come-up,"  "my  merry  men  all" 
kind  of  ballad.  The  majesty,  the  distinc- 
tion, the  symmetry  of  Virgil  evaporate  in 
both  ;  more  than  in  Dryden,  who,  at  any 
rate,  was  a  master  of  the  English  language 
and  of  the  rhymed  couplet.  Mr.  Coning- 
ton's excellent  prose  version  does  not  re- 


62  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

the  genius  of  Roman  poetry  is  wrapt  up 
in  its  form.  It  is  hardly  communicable 
at  all  except  in  the  original  words. 
Translations  of  it  are  vain  exercises  of 
ingenuity. 

Horace  remains  to  this  day  the  type 
of  the  untranslatable.  Such  wit,  grace, 
sense,  fire,  and  affection  never  took  such 
perfect  form — the  perfect  form  of  some 
gem  of  Athens,  or  some  coin  of  Syracuse 


tain,  hardly  seeks  to  retain,  any  echo  of 
the  music,  any  trace  of  the  mien  of  the 
mighty  Roman.  It  is  useful  to  those  who 
need  help  in  reading  Virgil,  but  it  is  not 
such  a  veritable  version  as  Mr.  Lang  has 
given  us  of  Homer  and  Theocritus,  and 
Dr.  Carlyle  of  the  Inferno,  or  Amyot  of 
Daphnis  and  Chloe.  There  is  but  one  way 
in  which  what  used  to  be  called  the  ' '  Eng- 
lish reader  "  can  enjoy  his  Virgil,  and  that 
way  is  to  learn  Latin  enough  to  read  him, 
and  I  earnestly  counsel  him  so  to  do. 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  6^ 

—  save  in  those  irrecoverable  lyrics, 
where  Sappho  and  Alcseus,  they  tell  us, 
clothed  yet  richer  thoughts  in  even  rarer 
words.  * 

'  Since  Horace,  by  common  consent,  is 
untranslatable,  the  translations  of  him, 
as  might  be  expected,  are  innumerable. 
Where  Milton  and  Pope  did  not  succeed, 
and  where  many  a  poet  has  failed,  the 
prize  is  not  within  the  reach  of  mortal 
man.  Lord  Derby's  shots,  perhaps  of 
all,  come  nearest  the  bull's-eye.  Some 
odes  of  Mr.  Conington  are  readable ;  he 
succeeds  far  better  with  Horace  than  with 
Virgil.  On  the  whole,  perhaps,  the  Eng- 
lish reader,  who  will  study  the  commen- 
tary and  version  of  Sir  Theodore  Martin, 
will  get  some  definite  idea  of  one  of  the 
most  interesting  figures  in  the  whole  range 
of  letters,  of  the  most  modern  and  most 
familiar  of  the  anci  mts. 

Mr.  Munro  and  Mr.  Eobinson  Ellis  have 
given  us  editions  of  Lucretius  and  of  Ca- 


64  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

It  is  a  melancholy  tlioiight  that,  with 
all  our  new  apparatus  of  scholarship 
and  antiquarian  research,  the  present 
generation  has  less  vital  hold  on  ancient 
poetry  than   our  forefathers  had.     We 

tullus  which  are  an  honour  to  English 
scholarship.  The  admirable  prose  version 
of  Lucretius  by  Mr.  Munro  is  chiefly  of 
service  to  the  student.  The  poetic  power 
of  the  great  philosopher-poet  is  seen  only 
in  skeleton.  Mr.  Ellis'  crabbed  verse  trans- 
lation of  Catullus  is  mainly  useful  as  a 
specimen  of  what  a  translation  should  not 
be.  Scholars  have  an  incurable  way  with 
them,  of  pelting  us  with  queer  uncommon 
phrases  which  have  a  meaning  perhaps 
identical  with  the  original  words,  but 
which  together  produce  a  grotesque  effect, 
wholly  out  of  harmony  with  the  poem 
translated.     How  can  lines  such  as — 

"  Late-won  loosener  of  the  wary  girdle," 
or — 

"  Pray  unbody  him  only  nose  for  ever," 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  65 

read  it  less,  quote  it  less,  care  for  it  less 
than  of  old.  The  pedantry  of  collators 
and  grammarians,  the  mechanic  routine 
of  the  examination  system,  have  almost 
quenched  that  noble  zest  in  the  classics 

represent  the  airy  notes  of  the  most  fantas- 
tic of  the  Latin  poets,  pouring  forth  his 
song  like  the  lark  on  the  wing  ?  Or,  again, 
can  such  a  line  as — 

"  The  race  is  to  Ate  glued," 
represent  the  majestic  terror  of  ^schylus? 
In  spite  of  Marlowe,  Pope,  Dryden,  and 
Rowe,  who  have  all  tried  their  hands  on 
the  Latin  poets,  it  may  be  doubted  if  any 
translation  of  them  in  verse  can  give  any 
part  of  their  genius,  unless  it  be  of  the 
Satires  and  the  Comedies,  of  which  spirited 
and  readable  versions,  or  rather  para- 
phrases, exist.  But  better  than  transla- 
tions are  such  admirable  commentaries  on 
the  classics,  as  those  of  Sellar,  Symonds, 
F,  Myers,  Simcox,  Theodore  Martin,  Co- 
nington,  Ellis,  and  Munro. 


66  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

which  was  meat  and  drink  to  them  of 
old,  to  Fox,  Johnson,  Addison,  or  Milton. 
Our  boys  at  university  and  school  are 
ground  between  the  upper  and  the  nether 
millstone  of  interminable  "passes," 
"Little-goes,"  and  "Finals ; "  so  that  to 
a  prize  boy  at  Eton  or  Baliol  his  classi- 
cal authors  are  no  longer  a  glorious  field 
of  enjoyment  and  of  thought — but  what 
a  cricket-ground  is  to  a  professional 
bowler,  a  monotonous  hunting-ground 
for  a  good  ' '  average  "  and  gate-money. 
A  rational  choice  of  books  would  re- 
store to  us  the  healthy  use  of  the  great 
classics  of  antiquity.  Most  of  us  find 
that  true  sympathy  with  our  classics 
begins  only  then,  when  our  academic 
study  of  them  is  wholly  at  an  end.  The 
college  prizeman  and  the  college  tutor 
cannot  read  a  chorus  in  the  Trilogy  but 
what  his  mind  instinctively  wanders  on 
optatives,  choriambi,  and  that  happy 
conjecture  of  Smelfungus  in  the  antis- 


THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS.  ^^ 

trophe.  A  less  constant  thumbing  of 
glossaries  and  commentaries  is  needful 
to  those  who  would  enjoy. 

But  even  to  those  to  whom  the  origi- 
nals are  quite  or  almost  closed,  a  con- 
ception of  the  ancient  authors  is  an 
indispensable  condition  of  rational  edu- 
cation. A  clear  idea  of  their  subjects, 
methods,  form,  and  genius,  is  within 
the  power  of  all  systematic  readers. 
Our  own  generation  has  multiplied  the 
resources  by  which  they  may  be  made 
familiar.  All  such  resources  have  their 
value  ;  a  combination  of  them  can  give 
us  something,  though  all  together  can- 
not give  us  the  whole.  A  curious  pro- 
fusion of  translation,  in  prose  and  in 
verse,  singular  critical  insight,  and 
unwearied  zeal  to  present  antiquity  to 
us  as  a  whole,  is  the  special  service  of 
our  own  age.  Painting,  poetry,  music, 
the  stage,  are  all  working  to  the  same 
end.    So  that,  with  all  that  art,  criti- 


68  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

cism,  and  translation  can  do,  the  un- 
learned, if  they  seek  it  diligently,  may 
find  the  entrance,  at  least,  into  the 
portico  of  Athene. 

It  is  the  age  of  accurate  translation. 
The  present  generation  has  produced  a 
complete  library  of  versions  of  the  great 
classics,  chiefly  in  prose,  partly  in  verse, 
more  faithful,  true,  and  scholarly  than 
anything  ever  produced  before.  It  is 
the  photographic  age  of  translation ; 
and  all  that  the  art  of  sun-pictures  has 
done  for  the  recording  of  ancient  build- 
ings, and  more  than  that,  the  art  of 
literal  translation  has  done  for  the  un- 
derstanding of  ancient  poetry.  A  com- 
plete translation  of  a  great  poem  is,  of 
course,  an  impossible  thing.  The  finest 
translation  is  at  best  but  a  copy  of  a 
part ;  it  gives  us  more  or  less  crudely 
some  element  of  the  original ;  the  colour, 
the  light  and  shade,  the  glow,  are  not 
there,  lost  as  completely  as  they  are  in 


THE   CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  69 

a  photograph.  But  in  the  large  photo- 
graph— say  of  the  Sistine  Madonna — the 
lines  and  the  composition  are  there,  as 
no  human  hand  ever  drew  them.  And 
so,  in  a  fine  translation,  the  thought 
survives.  One  method  gives  us  one  ele- 
ment, another  method  some  fresh  ele- 
ment, and  together  we  may  get  some 
real  impression  of  the  mighty  whole. 

Now,  when  some  of  us  may  have 
partly  lost  touch  of  the  original,  and 
some  may  never  have  acquired  it,  the 
use  of  translations,  especially  the  use  of 
varied  translations,  may  give  us  much. 
In  the  very  front  rank  come,  for  verse, 
Morshead's  Trilogy  of  ^schylus,  and 
his  (Edipus  the  King  of  Sophocles,  Mr. 
Philip  Worsley's  Odyssey,  Lord  Derby's 
Iliad,  Frere's  Aristophanes,  the  Greek 
Lyrics  of  Milman,  and  Fitzgerald's  Cal- 
deron.  These  are  all  readable  as  poems 
in  themselves  ;  but  they  hardly  come  up 
to  the  typical  examples  of  translations — 


70  THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS. 

translations  of  a  poet  by  a  poet — such 
as  Shelley's  Fragments,  and  Coleridge's 
Wallenstein.  It  is  greatly  to  be  deplored 
that  Coleridge  did  not  act  on  Shelley's 
suggestion  and  translate  Faust.  They 
who  conscientiously  struggle  through 
Hayward,  Sir  Theodore  Martin,  Miss 
Swanwick,  Bayard  Taylor,  and  the  rest, 
would  have  been  grateful  to  see  Faust, 
in  the  language  of  Wallenstein,  Kuhla 
Khan,  and  Christdbelle.  But  there  is 
only  one  of  the  translators  of  our  day 
whom  we  can  read  without  the  continual 
sense  that  we  are  reading  a  translation. 
Edward  Fitzgerald's  translations  alone 
read  as  if  they  were  original  composi- 
tions; but  the  question  for  ever  recurs, 
Are  they  translations  at  all  ? 

For  prose  we  can  hardly  have  anything 
better  than  the  Homer  by  Mr.  Andrew 
Lang,  Professor  Butcher,  E.  Myers,  and 
Walter  Leaf ;  Mr.  Lang's  Theocritus; 
Mr.    Myers'    Pindar;    Mr.    Conington's 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  7 1 

prose  Virgil;  Munro's  Lucretius;  the 
Inferno,  by  John  Carlyle ;  Dante,  by 
Lamennais  ;  the  Cid,  by  Damas  Hinard. 
Each  of  these,  in  its  own  way,  gives  us 
almost  as  much  as  translation  ever  can 
give.  The  prose  translator  naturally  fails 
to  give  us  music,  movement,  form  ;  but 
he  gives  us  the  substantial  thought  with 
almost  complete  fulness.  The  verse  trans- 
lation, in  the  hands  of  a  poet,  if  it  some- 
what miss  the  thought,  recalls  to  us  some 
echoes  of  the  lilt  of  the  poem.  Put  the 
two  together,  use  them  as  helps  alter- 
nately, and  much  of  the  real  comes  forth 
to  us.  Take  the  prose  Iliad  of  Leaf, 
Lang,  and  E.  Myers,  and  then  with  that 
listen  to  the  music  of  old  Chapman,  and 
the  martial  ring  of  some  battle-piece  in 
Pope  or  Lord  Derby,  and  something  more 
than  an  echo  of  Homer  is  ours.  Or,  what 
is  better  still,  take  the  prose  Odyssey  of 
Butcher  and  Lang,  and  therewith  read 
the  exquisite  verse   of  Philip  Worsley, 


72  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

and  some  of  the  quiet  pieces  of  Cowper, 
and  then  with  the  designs  of  Flaxman, 
and  the  local  colour  of  Wordsworth's 
Greece,  and  Mahaffy  and  Symonds,  the 
imagination  can  restore  us  a  vision  of 
the  Ithacan  tale.  The  Inferno  of  John 
Carlyle  has  an  even  greater  advantage  ; 
for  the  Biblical  style,  by  association,  sug- 
gests the  music  and  pathos  of  the  poetry, 
and  that  without  the  affectation  which 
attends  all  reproductions  of  Biblical 
phraseology.  It  is  continued  by  A.  J. 
Butler  in  the  Purgatory  and  Paradise. 
Ihe  archaic  French  of  Lamennais'  ver- 
sion has  much  the  same  effect.  These 
with  Gary,  and  the  beautiful  book  of 
Dean  Ghurch,  ought  to  enable  us  to  get 
at  the  sense  and  something  of  the  form 
of  the  Divine  Gomedy. 

With  all  this  wealth  of  translation  we 
have  such  elaborate  general  works  on  the 
history  of  ancient  literature  as  those  of 
K.  O.  Muller,  Mure,  and  Simcox ;   and 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  73 

the  fine  studies  of  Greek  and  Latin  poets, 
by  J.  A.  Symonds,  F.  Myers,  Professors 
Munro,  Robinson  Ellis,  Conington,  and 
Sellar  ;  and  by  Mr.  Gladstone,  and  Mat- 
thew Arnold.  With  all  this  abundance 
of  critical  resource,  one  who  knows  any- 
thing of  Latin  and  Greek  can  learn  to 
enjoy  his  ancient  poets  ;  and  even  one 
who  knows  nothing  can  gain  some  idea 
of  their  genius. 

What  Homer  is  to  Greece,  the  early 
national  epics  and  myths  of  other  coun- 
tries are  to  them ;  far  inferior  to  the 
Greek  in  beauty,  of  less  perennial  value, 
but  the  true  germ  of  the  literature  of 
each.  Yet  to  the  bulk  of  readers  this 
fountain-head  of  all  poetry  lies  in  a  re- 
gion unexplored,  as  unknown  as  to  our 
fathers  were  the  sources  of  the  Nile — 
fontium  qui  celat  origines.  The  early 
poetry  of  India,  with  its  wonderful 
mythology,  rich  as  it  is  for  its  own  poetic 
worth,  opens  to  us  more  of  the  old  Ori- 


74  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

ental  mind  than  many  a  history.  Sir 
William  Jones,  who  first  made  this 
poetry  accessible  to  Europe,  was,  in  the 
intellectual  world,  the  Columbus  who 
joined  two  continents.  Since  his  day 
the  labours  of  Professors  Wilson,  Max 
Miiller,  and  Monier  Williams  have 
opened  to  us  a  new  region  of  poetry, 
united  two  twin  brethren,  who  have  long 
lived  estranged.  Such  a  book  as  the 
Arabian  Nights  we  are  too  apt  to  look 
on  as  a  story-book,  even  perhaps  a  story- 
book for  children.  It  is  not  so.  Read 
between  the  lines,  it  presents  to  us  the 
mind  and  civilisation  of  Islam,  the  civil 
side  of  that  of  which  the  Koran  is  the 
religious. 

There  is  the  same  epical  embodiment  of 
the  national  genius  in  our  early  European 
poetry.  The  fierce  Teuton  and  Norse 
races  have  each  left  us  their  own  myths, 
of  which  this  century  alone  has  recog- 
nised the  wild  and  tragic  power,  and  has, 


THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS.  75 

in  so  many  forms,  now  opened  to  the 
modem  reader.  The  highest  note  of  the 
barbaric  drama  is  reached  in  the  Nibe- 
lungen  Lied — the  Thyestean  tragedy  of 
the  North — which,  but  for  the  excessive 
appeal  to  horror  in  its  weird  imagery, 
might  take  its  place  with  the  great  epics 
of  the  world.  Nay,  that  last  terrific 
scene  in  the  Hall  of  Etzel  rests  for  ever 
on  the  memory  as  hardly  inferior  to  that 
other  supreme  hour  of  vengeance,  when 
the  rags  fall  from  off  Odysseus,  and  he 
confronts  the  suitors  with  his  awful 
bow.^ 

^  Although  every  one,  since  Carlyle  gave 
his  sketch  of  it  {Miscell.  vol.  iii.),  has 
known  something  of  the  Nibelungen  Lied, 
and  although  modern  poetry  and  art  have 
made  it,  in  one  form  or  other,  as  familiar 
as  any  legendary  poem  extant,  it  is  singular 
that  we  have  not  got  it  in  English  in  any 
satisfactory  shape.     For  my  part  I  prefer 


76  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

France,  too,  has  her  epic  literature  in 
the  Chansons  de  Gestes,  the  Romans, 
the  Fabliaux — especially  in  the  Chajison 
de  Roland,  and  the  Roman  du  Re^iart, 
which  should  serve  as  types  of  the  rest. 
Spain  and  the  Celtic  race  of  Western 
England  and  Western  France  have  two 


the  German  to  the  Norse  type  of  the  epic  ; 
for  the  latter  has  nothing  equivalent  to  the 
sustained  and  elaborate  drama  of  the  ven- 
geance of  Chriemhild.  But  where  we  can 
see  plainly  the  scheme  and  bones  of  a 
mighty  poem,  it  is  vexatious  to  read  it 
spun  out  into  the  monotonous  garrulity  of 
the  existing  2459  stanzas,  or  to  read  it  in 
the  halting,  stammering  doggrel  of  Lett- 
som.  We  need  much  a  somewhat  con- 
densed version  of  the  Siegfried  and 
Chriemhild  myth  in  the  plain  and  stirring 
English  in  which  Southey  cast  the  Cid,  or, 
better  still,  in  that  wherein  Malory  cast 
the  old  Arthurian  Chansons. 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  'J'J 

great  epic  cycles,  which  cluster  round  the 
names  of  the  Cid  and  of  Arthur. 

Whilst  the  Spanish  Cycle  is  the  more 
national,  heroic,  and  stirring,  the  Ar- 
thurian Cycle  is  the  best  embodiment  of 
chivalry,  of  romance,  of  gallantry.  The 
vast  cluster  of  tales  which  envelop  King 
Arthur  and  his  comrades  is  the  expres- 
sion of  European  chivalry  and  the  feudal 
genius  as  a  whole,  idealising  the  knight, 
the  squire,  the  lady,  the  princess  of  the 
Middle  Ages.  For  all  practical  purposes, 
we  English  have  it  in  its  best  form  ;  for 
the  compilation  of  Sir  Thomas  Malory 
is  wrought  into  a  mould  of  pure  English, 
hardly  second  to  the  English  of  the 
Bible.  ^  And  yet  our  Arthurian  Cycle 
has  left  far  less  traces  on  our  national 
character  than  the  cycle  of  the  Cid  has 

^  It  will  be  seen  that  in  the  original  text 
of  Malory  about  98  per  cent  of  the  words 
are  pure  English,  without  Latin  alloy. 


78  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

left  on  that  of  Spain.  How  high  and 
loyal  a  type  is  each!  Of  the  Cid  it  is 
said — 

'  *  Lo  que  non  f  erie  el  Caboso  por  quanto  en 
el  mundo  ha ; 
Una  deslealtanza,  ca    non  la  fizo   algu- 
andre." 

"  That  which  the  Perfect  One  would  not 
do  for  all  that  the  world  holds  ; 
For   a  deed  of  disloyalty  he  never  yet 
did  in  aught."  ' 

*  The  Cid  Cycle  of  poems  has  fared  bet- 
ter than  the  Nibelungen.  Besides  the 
well-known  translations  by  Lockhart  in 
verse,  and  by  Southey  in  prose,  there  is  a 
stirring  fragment  of  the  Cid  poem  by  Frere, 
and  two  analyses  and  versions  of  the  Cid 
ballads  and  the  Epic  :  the  former  by  George 
Dennis,  the  latter  by  John  Ormsby.  With- 
out going  so  far  as  Southey,  who  called 
the  Cid  the  "  finest  poem  in  the  Span- 
ish language,"  or  so  far  as  Prescott,  who 
called  it  "the  most  remarkable  perform- 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  79 

And  SO  of  Lancelot  it  is  said  :  "  Thou 
were  head  of  all  Christian  knights  ;  and 
thou  were  the  courtiest  knight  that  ever 
bare  shield  ;  and  thou  were  the  truest 
friend  to  thy  lover  that  ever  bestrode 
horse  ;  and  thou  were  the  truest  lover  of 

ance  of  the  Middle  Ages,"  we  must  allow 
that  it  stands  in  the  very  first  rank  of 
national  poems.  Its  peculiar  value  to  us 
is  in  the  fact  that  it  is  the  earliest  of  all 
the  great  national  poems  of  modern  Europe 
which  have  reached  us  in  a  perfectly  una- 
dulterated form,  unless  we  include  Beowulf 
in  this  number.  And  if  we  take  the  ideal 
Cid  of  the  romances,  chronicle,  and  poem 
together,  and  as  he  lives  in  the  imagination 
of  the  Spanish  people,  the  Cid  legend 
stands  at  the  head  of  the  legendary  poetry 
of  Europe.  But  they  who  desire  to  master 
the  poem  itself  should  read  the  book  which 
Damas  Hinard  wrote  for  the  Empress 
Eugenie  (Paris,  4to,  1858),  the  text  with  a 
prose  version,  commentary,  and  glossary. 


8o  THE  CHOICE   OF  BOOKS. 

a  sinful  man  that  ever  loved  woman  ; 
and  thou  were  the  kindest  man  that  ever 
strake  with  sword ;  and  thou  were  the 
goodliest  person  ever  came  among  press 
of  knights  ;  and  thou  were  the  meekest 
man  and  the  gentlest  that  ever  ate  in 
hall  among  ladies  ;  and  thou  were  the 
sternest  knight  to  thy  mortal  foe  that 
ever  put  spear  in  the  rest."  i 

Methinks  that  the  tale  of  the  death  of 
Arthur,  Guinevere,  and  of  Lancelot,  as 
told  by  Malory,  along  with  the  death  and 
last  death-march  of  the  Cid,  as  told  in 
the  Chronicle,  may  stand  beside  the 
funeral  of  Hector,  which  closes  the 
Iliad— 

cj?  o'i y'  ducpieitoy  rd(pov"EKTopoi 

ITtTtoddjUOlO.^ 

^  afj  r  ayavoippocrvyy,  Kcxi  croii 
dyavuii  eTteeaai. — II.  xxiv.  772. 

2  In  nothing  has  the  revival  of  sound 
critical  taste  done  better  service  than  in  re- 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  8 1 

That  immense  and  varied  mass  of 
legend  had  its  religious  as  well  as  its 
secular  side.  The  Lives  of  the  Saints,  of 
which  the  Golden  Legend  is  the  cream, 
contains,  in  the  theological  domain,  the 
same  interminable  series  of  romances, 
usually  wearisome,  always  inventive, 
and  at  times  nobly  poetic,  which  the 
mediaeval  romances  give  us  in  the  do- 
main of  chivalry.     Far  more  useful  his- 

calling  us  to  the  Arthurian  Cycle,  the  day- 
spring  of  our  glorious  literature.  The  clos- 
ing hooks  of  Malory's  Arthur  certainly 
rank,  both  in  conception  and  in  form,  with 
the  best  poetry  of  Europe  ;  in  quiet  pathos 
and  reserved  strength  they  hold  their  own 
with  the  epics  of  any  age.  Beside  this 
simple,  manly  type  of  the  mediaeval  hero 
the  figures  in  the  Idylls  of  the  King  look 
like  the  dainty  Perseus  of  Canova  placed 
beside  the  heroic  Theseus  of  Pheidias. 
It  is  true,  as  Mr.  Matthew  Arnold  has 


4fe2>0 


82  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

torically,  and  far  more  closely  bound  up 
with  the  imaginative  literature  of  Europe, 
are  the  delightful  collections  of  Fabliaux, 
the  parent  of  so  much  in  Boccaccio, 
Chaucer,  even  in  Kabelais,  Shakespeare, 
and  Moliere.  That  wonderful  storehouse 
of  the  lay  and  bourgeois  spirit  of  the 
thirteenth  and  fourteenth  centuries  pre- 
serves for  us  an  inimitable  picture   of 

said,  that  poetry  and  prosf^  are  perfectly  dis- 
tinct forms  of  utterance.  But  the  line 
which  marks  off  poetry  from  prose  is  not 
an  absolutely  rigid  one,  and  we  may  have 
the  essentials  of  poetry  without  metre  or 
scansion.  In  Malory's  Death  of  Arthur  and 
Lancelot,  or  in  Chapters  of  Job  and  Isaiah 
in  the  English  Bible,  we  have  the  concep- 
tions, the  melody,  the  winged  words,  and 
inimitable  turns  of  phrase  which  consti- 
tute the  highest  poetry.  We  need  a  term 
to  include  the  best  imaginative  work  in  the 
most  artistic  form,  and  the  only  English 
word  left  is — poetry. 


THE  CHOICE   OF  BOOKS.  83 

the  knighthood,  ladyhood,  and  yeomanry 
of  the  Middle  Ages.' 

In  the  real  national  lays  of  the  old 
world,  in  legend,  romance,  and  tale,  in 
their  first  native  form,  we  have  a  com- 
plete history  of  civilisation  :  the  source 
from  which  Virgil  and  Livy,  Boccaccio 
and  Chaucer,  Shakespeare  and  Calderon, 

1  We  have  now  in  6  vols,  the  new  col- 
lection of  Fabliaux,  by  MM.  de  Montaiglon 
and  G.  Eaynaud  (Paris,  1872-1886).  But 
as  this,  the  first  complete  collection,  is 
printed  from  the  old  MSS.  verbatim,  it  is 
of  little  use  except  to  students  of  French 
literature.  The  prose  version  of  Legrand 
d'Aussy  is  eminently  readable  ;  but  as  the 
augmented  edition  of  this,  by  Renouard, 
is  not  now  very  easily  found,  an  accessible 
and  popular  prose  version  of  these  inimita- 
ble tales  is  amongst  the  pressing  wants  of 
the  general  reader.  And  herein  the  more 
outrageous  license  peculiar  to  this  form  of 
poetry,  might  very  well  disappear. 


84  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

drew  their  inspiration,  the  source  of 
almost  all  that  is  most  living  and  trne  in 
subsequent  art.  It  is  a  cycle  at  once  of 
poetry,  of  reflection,  of  manners,  the 
nature  of  the  race  flinging  itself  forth 
into  expression  in  its  own  artless  way 
before  the  canons  of  poetry  were  in- 
vented, or  the  race  of  critics  spawned. 
He  to  whom  this  poetry  as  a  whole  is 
familiar,  who  had  heard  its  full  heart 
throbbing  against  its  sturdy  side,  would 
know  the  great  spirits  of  the  human  race, 
and  would  live  in  some  of  its  noblest 
thoughts.  And  withal,  it  is  so  easy,  so 
plain,  and  fascinating  in  itself,  lying  in 
a  few  familiar  volumes,  one-tenth  of  the 
bulk  of  that  mountain  of  literary  husks, 
wherewith  men  fill  themselves  as  Mudie's 
cart  comes  round,  chewing  rather  than 
reading,  careless  of  method,  self-re- 
straint, or  moral  aim. 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  85 


CHAPTEK   III. 

POETS  OF  THE  MODERN  WORLD. 

Modern  poetry  in  its  developed  form 
opens  with  the  great  epic  of  Catholicism, 
the  Divina  Commedia  of  Dante.  We 
Northern  people  are  too  ready  to  treat 
our  own  Shakespeare  as  the  poetic  em- 
bodiment of  all  that  can  interest  hu- 
manity. But  what  Shakespeare  is  to 
the  Teutonic  races,  Dante  is  to  the 
Latin  races.  And  on  certain  sides  he  is 
far  more  distinctly  the  philosopher,  the 
historian,  the  prophet.  He  is  all  this, 
often  in  a  way  which  seriously  mars  his 
perfection  as  a  poet.  But  to  a  student 
of  literature,  it  is  all  the  more  interest- 
ing that  he  so  often  recalls  to  us  in 
whole  cantos  of  his  poem,  now  Plato, 
now  Tacitus,  now  Augustine.    The  Di- 


86  THE  CHOICE   OF   BOOKS. 

vine  Comedy  is  no  easy  task;  neither  its 
language,  nor  its  meaning,  nor  its  design 
are  always  obvious.  To  most  readers  it 
presents  itself  as  a  mystical  vision;  some 
find  in  it  historical  satire,  others  a  re- 
ligious allegory.  It  reminds  us  at  times 
of  the  Vision  of  Piers  Ploughman,  again 
of  the  Pilgrim's  Progress,  now  of  the 
Apocalypse  and  the  Book  of  Job,  or 
again  of  the  Faery  Queen  and  Faust. 
It  is  all  of  these  and  much  more.  It  is 
the  review  in  one  vast  picture  of  human 
life  as  a  whole,  and  human  civilisation 
as  a  whole;  aU  that  it  had  been,  was, 
and  might  become,  as  presented  to  the 
greatest  brain  and  profoundest  nature 
of  the  Middle  Ages,  It  is  man  and  the 
world  seen,  it  is  true,  through  the  Catho- 
lic Camera  Obscura — a  picture  intense, 
vivid,  complete,  albeit  in  a  light  not 
seldom  narrow  and  artificial.  Every  part 
and  episode  has  its  double  and  treble 
meaning.     And   when    we    have    pene- 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  Sj 

trated  within  to  know  some  one  or  two 
of  its  senses,  it  is  to  find  that  there  are 
many  more  wrapped  up  within  its  folds 
and  hidden  to  our  eye.  It  is  a  Bible  or 
Gospel — Bible  and  Gospel  without  reve- 
lation or  canonical  authority,  and,  like 
the  older  Bible,  full  of  mystery  and  diffi- 
culty ;  but,  none  the  less,  in  spite  of 
mysteriousness  and  difficulties,  especially 
fitted  for  the  daily  study  of  all  who  can 
read  with  patience,  insight,  and  single- 
ness of  heart.  As  it  has  been  said  of 
other  books  that  move  us  deeply,  "in 
quietness  and  confidence  shall  be  your 
strength." 

There  is  an  entire  library  of  Dantesque 
literature,  mostly  to  my  mind  needless. 
But  it  must  be  remembered  that  few 
readers  can  enjoy  Dante  perfectly  with- 
out the  assistance  of  some  translation  or 
notes  of  some  kind.  Mr.  Kuskin  once 
hazarded  the  glorious  paradox  that 
Gary's  Dante  was  better  reading  than 


55  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

Milton's  Paradise  Lost.  Gary  is  useful 
for  Dante,  just  as  Conington  is  useful 
for  Virgil;  but  it  can  hardly  be  called 
poetry.  The  other  verse  translations  of 
Dante  I  can  only  read  as  "cribs."  Dr. 
John  Carlyle's  admirable  prose  version 
of  the  Inferno  has  been  completed  by 
the  Piirgatorio  and  the  Paradiso  of 
A.  J.  Butler,  making  an  almost  perfect 
English  version.  For  my  own  part  I 
prefer  Lamennais'  translation  of  the  Di- 
vine Comedy  into  antique  French  prose, 
the  effect  of  which  is  at  once  weird  and 
solemn.  This,  with  the  brief  notes  in 
the  Florentine  edition,  and  what  the  two 
Carlyles  and  Dean  Church  have  written, 
and  the  diligent  reading  of  Dante  him- 
self, including  his  Vita  JYuova  (Rossetti's 
excellent  translation),  and  the  rest  of  his 
prose,  should  be  better  than  the  entire 
Dantcsque  library  which  has  grown  up 
round  tlie  poem.  The  most  melancholy 
of  all  sui)crstitions  is  that  which  restricts 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  89 

the  reading  of  Dante  to  the  Inferno,  and 
even  to  a  few  famous  episodes  in  that. 
The  Inferno  alone  gives  no  adequate 
idea  of  Dante's  social  conceptions.  The 
Purgatorio  is,  to  my  mind,  the  most 
profound,  as  well  as  the  most  beautiful 
part  of  all  the  work  of  Dante. 

The  first  commentator  on  Dante,  Boc- 
caccio, has  left  us  the  earliest  perfect 
example  of  modern  prose ;  on  one  side 
of  it,  still  the  most  beautiful  of  modern 
prose,  that  which  in  music  and  native 
grace  comes  nearest  to  the  prose  of 
Plato.  The  immortal  stories  of  the 
Decameron  have  that  rich  glow  of  the 
wit  and  grace  of  the  Middle  Ages,  that 
aroma  of  full-blossoming  life  which  binds 
us  with  its  spell  in  the  Italian  dramas  of 
Shakespeare,  and  which  is  so  near  akin 
to  the  Italian  mastery  of  the  arts  of 
form.  The  Decameron,  as  belongs  to  its 
age  and  the  whole  Fabliaux  literature 
from  which  it  sprung,  is  redolent  of  that 


90  THE  CHOICE   OF  BOOKS. 

libertine  humanism  which  stamps  the 
Renascence;  but  not  a  few  of  its  tales  are 
free  from  offence,  and  there  are  pub- 
lished selections  which  may  fitly  be  read 
by  the  young.  ^ 

The  great  Italian  epics  of  Ariosto  and 
Tasso,  and  the  lyrics  of  Petrarch,  have 
exercised  over  the  ages  which  they  have 
charmed,  and  over  the  races  whom  they 
have  inspired,  an  influence  as  profound 
and  humanising  as  any  which  poetry  has 
ever  exerted.  We,  whose  imagination 
has  been  trained  by  darker  and  fiercer 
types,  do  not  easily  fall  in  with  the 
poetic  sources  of  the  Southern  passion 
for  sentiment  and  colour.     But  though 

^  Amongst  others  there  is  a  small  selec- 
tion for  the  use  of  schools  (Turin,  1882, 
8vo).  Boccaccio's  language  and  meaning 
are  so  easy  that  neither  translation  nor 
commentary  is  needed,  nor  do  I  know  of 
any  worth  reading. 


THE  CHOICE   OF  BOOKS.  9 1 

this  Italian  poetry  is  in  a  world  far  other 
from  ours  of  to-day,  and  though  much 
of  it  is  in  a  form  artificial  to  our  taste, 
its  importance  in  literature  and  in  his- 
tory should  give  it  a  place  in  any  syste- 
matic course  of  reading.  ^ 

^  No  one  in  this  century  seems  to  read 
the  English  translations  of  the  Italian 
epics  in  rhymed  heroics  in  imitation  of 
Mr.  Pope  and  Mr.  Dryden,  which  were  so 
much  in  vogue  in  the  last  century,  or  those 
which  in  imitation  of  Chapman  were  in 
vogue  in  the  century  preceding.  It  must 
be  allowed  that  they  are  rather  meritorious 
performances  than  good  reading  ;  but  it 
was  better  to  read  Ariosto  and  Tasso  so 
than  not  to  read  them  at  all.  I  feel  the 
same  even  of  the  many  really  excellent 
versions  of  Petrarch's  sonnets.  But  the 
subtle  complexity  and  charm  of  the  Pe- 
trarchian  sonnet  is  as  incommunicable  as 
that  of  Horace.  Yet  one  would  like  to  see 
a  version  by  Mr.  Swinburne. 


92  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

In  the  later  Italian  poets  there  are  no 
unfrequent  bursts  of  true  poetry,  as  if 
from  time  to  time  the  great  lyre  of  old 
ages  gave  forth  of  itself  some  strange 
spontaneous  air,  where  it  hung  fixed  as 
a  trophy  of  the  past,  though  there  be 
none  who  dare  take  it  from  its  resting- 
place,  or  strike  the  chords  of  the  de- 
parted masters.^ 

As  for  French  poetry,  apart  from  the 
glorious  lyrics  of  the  older  language, 
some  exquisite  echoes  of  which  have  been 
heard  again  in  our  own  age,  the  world- 
wide and  world-abiding  masterpieces  are 
to  be  found  in  the  long  roll  of  the  drama- 
tists of  France.     The  French  drama  is, 

'  And  that  in  spite  of  the  beautiful 
things  of  Filicaja,  Leopardi,  and  Manzoni, 
whose  Cinque  Maggio  surpasses  that  of 
Byron  almost  as  much  as  his  Promessi 
Sposi  falls  short  of  the  Bride  of  Lainmer- 
moor. 


THE  CHOICE  OF   BOOKS.  93 

to  the  ordinary  English  reader,  one  of 
the  stumbling-blocks  of  literature.  He 
finds  it  universally  counted  amongst  the 
classics  of  modern  Europe,  and  most 
justly  so;  he  gathers  that  it  exerts  a  pro- 
found fascination  and  influence  over  the 
French  race;  he  can  perceive  its  sym- 
metry and  subtle  art  of  style.  But  he 
does  not  enjoy  it,  and  he  does  not  read  it, 
and,  except  when  some  famous  "star" 
is  performing,  he  does  not  care  to  hear 
it  from  the  stage.  And  whether  he 
listens  to  it,  or  reads  it,  he  inevitably 
ends  with  that  most  futile  resource, 
some  trite  and  banal  comparison  with 
Shakespeare.  Glorious  "Will  has  not  a 
little  to  answer  for,  in  that,  most  unwit- 
tingly, he  has  stopped  up  the  ears  of  his 
countrymen  to  some  of  the  most  perfect 
moods  of  the  lyre,  which  chanced  to  be 
those  he  never  struck.  There  is  much 
in  the  method  and  genius  of  the  French 
drama  which  falls  chill  and  stark  on 


94  THE   CHOICE  OP  BOOKS. 

ears  accustomed  to  the  abounding  life  of 
a  Shakespearean  play.  He  who  begins 
by  comparing  the  two  methods  is  lost; 
he  might  as  well  compare  an  Italian 
garden  and  a  tropical  forest.  To  enjoy 
these  French  dramas  in  all  their  subtle 
finish  Eoquires  perhaps  for  an  English- 
man a  more  special  study  of  their 
peculiar  poetic  form  than  most  readers 
can  give.  The  French  drama,  like  the 
Greek  and  the  Roman,  is  to  the  typical 
drama  of  Spain,  England,  and  Germany 
what  a  statue  is  to  a  picture.  Neither 
lyrical  wealth  of  imagery,  nor  rapidity 
of  action,  nor  multiplicity  and  contrast 
of  situations,  nor  subtle  involution  of 
motive,  are  the  instruments  of  art  em- 
ployed. The  dominant  aim  is  to  pro- 
duce one  massive  impression;  the  artistic 
instrument  is  harmony  of  tone;  the  form 
is  consistently  ideal,  never  realistic.  The 
realism  and  movement  which  we  look 
for  in  a  play  are  as  alien  to  the  classical 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  95 

drama  as  trousers  and  boots  to  a  classi- 
cal statue. 

Even  if  the  French  classical  plays  had 
less  poetic  power  of  their  own,  they 
would  still  hold  a  high  place  in  any  seri- 
ous scheme  of  reading  for  their  historical 
and  ethical  value.  They  form  the  most 
systematic  and  successful  effort  ever 
made  in  literature  to  idealise  in  modern 
poetry  the  great  types  of  character  and 
race,  as  they  move  in  one  unending  pro- 
cession across  the  general  history  of  man- 
kind. They  epitomise  civilisation  in  a 
regular  series  of  striking  tableaux  of  the 
past,  and  of  the  East ;  so  that  they  hold 
up  the  mirror  Cnot  quite  successfully  to 
Nature),  but  to  the  successive  phases  of 
human  society  and  the  moral  power  and 
tone  of  each.  Thus  Judged,  in  spite  of 
some  serious  defects  and  much  coldness, 
yet  by  the  innate  grandeur  of  his  soul, 
the  statuesque  unity  of  form,  and  by  vir- 
tue of  the  profound  moral  impression 


96  THE   CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

which  he  has  left  on  his  countrymen, 
Corneille  remains  one  of  the  greatest  of 
modern  poets. 

The  even  superior  grace,  tenderness, 
and  versatility  of  Racine  make  him  a 
more  popular  favourite.  It  is  not  nec- 
essary to  enter  on  the  secular  debate  to 
which  of  the  rivals  the  palm  is  to  be 
given.  Voltaire,  with  all  his  inferiority 
to  both,  carried  out  in  a  form  which  suits 
the  genius  of  his  language  and  people  the 
design  of  the  elder  dramatists,  to  idealise 
for  our  modern  world  most  remote  and 
different  types  of  human  life.  Dryden 
and  Otway  in  England  attempted  the 
same  purpose ;  Metastasio  and  Alfieri 
were  more  successful  in  Italy  ;  Goethe 
and  Schiller  revived  it  in  Germany.  It 
cannot  be  pronounced  a  true  success  in 
the  hands  of  any  of  them.  Doubtless,  it 
remains  for  the  future  to  show  us  all  that 
awaits  human  genius  in  this  magnificent 
field  of  art — the  idealisation  of  the  past 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  97 

in  a  form  at  once  poetic  and  true.  Scott 
may  be  said  to  have  accomplished  it  in 
prose  for  considerable  epochs  and  phases 
of  the  past.  No  one  can  pretend  that 
even  Shakespeare  did  anything  in  this 
sphere  at  all  worthy  of  himself ;  or  in- 
deed that  he  had  any  adequate  sense  of 
the  problem.  With  all  their  shortcom- 
ings and  their  tolerance  of  academic  con- 
ventions, the  French  dramatists  afford 
us  the  most  serious,  and  on  the  whole 
the  most  successful,  example  of  a  real 
historical  poetry. 

The  same  earnestness  of  purpose  and 
systematic  method  distinguish  also  the 
old  comic  drama  of  France.  Justice  has 
been  done  to  the  inimitable  genius  of 
Moliere.  It  may  be  doubted  if  justice 
has  yet  been  done  to  his  power  as  philos- 
opher, moralist,  and  teacher.  As  pro- 
found a  master  of  human  nature  on  its 
brighter  side  as  Shakespeare  himself,  he 
gives  us  an  even  more  complete  and  sys- 


98  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

tematic  analysis  of  modern  society,  and 
a  still  larger  gallery  of  its  familiar  types. 
Inexhaustible  good  nature,  imperturbable 
good  sense,  instinctive  aversion  to  folly, 
affectation,  meanness,  and  untruth,  ever 
mark  Moliere ;  he  is  always  humane, 
courteous,  sound  of  heart ;  he  is  never 
savage,  morose,  cynical,  or  obscene  ;  he 
has  neither  the  mad  ribaldry  of  Aiis- 
tophanes,  nor  the  mad  rage  of  Swift ;  he 
never  ceases  to  be  a  man,  wise,  tender, 
and  good  in  every  fibre,  even  whilst  we 
feel  the  darker  mood  of  pensive  perplex- 
ity that  human  frivolity  perpetually 
awakens  in  his  soul. 

Men  will  continue  to  ask  if  his  great 
masterpiece,  the  Misanthrope^  be  pure 
comedy  or  serious  drama ;  if  the  poet 
intended  to  justify  Alceste,  or  to  excuse 
PhiUnte.  Doubtless  both  fountains  of 
feeling  well  up  in  him,  as  he  meditates 
on  the  insoluble  problems  of  artificial 
society   and   the   eternal   dilemmas  of 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  99 

social  compromise.  The  systematic  and 
philosophic  spirit  of  Moliere  strike  us 
emphatically  if  we  take  the  whole  collec- 
tion of  his  plays,  and  see  how  distinctly 
each  type  of  character  is  in  turn  pre- 
sented to  our  eyes,  and  how  complete 
and  various  the  entire  series  appears. 
No  other  painter  of  manners  has  given 
us  a  gallery  of  portraits  so  carefully 
classed.  But  the  measure  of  Moliere  is 
hardly  to  be  taken  till  we  see  him  pre- 
sented at  the  Comedie  Frangaise  ;  where  a 
long  tradition  of  actors  and  critics,  com- 
bining with  each  other,  produces  the 
most  perfect  embodiment  of  the  scenic  art 
which  the  modern  stage  has  achieved. 

The  prolific  drama  of  Spain  is  cer- 
tainly, from  a  national  and  ethical  point 
of  view,  more  interesting  than  the  classi- 
cal drama  of  France.  In  variety,  imagi- 
native energy,  and  hrio,  it  is  surpassed 
only  by  our  own.  It  has  exerted  an  even 
more  manifold  and  permanent  hold  over 


ICX3  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

the  minds  of  its  own  people.  And  in  its 
association  with  the  religion  of  the  peo- 
ple, their  profoundest  religious  belief,  as 
well  as  their  inmost  religious  feeling,  the 
Spanish  drama  has  a  quality  which  gives 
that  supreme  dignity  to  the  drama  of 
Athens,  but  which,  since  the  Middle 
Ages,  has  been  lost  elsewhere  to  the 
drama  of  Europe.  The  Spanish  drama 
by  its  wonderful  originality  and  vari- 
ety is  certainly  one  of  the  most  striking 
phenomena  in  the  history  of  poetry. 
It  is  melancholy  to  think  how  com- 
plete is  the  neglect  of  a  literature  so 
rich  and  rare.  Of  late  Calderon  is  be- 
ginning to  be  better  known.  His  magni- 
ficent imagination,  his  infinite  fertiUty, 
his  power  and  passion  have  a  real  Shake- 
spearean note  ;  whilst  his  purity  and  de- 
votional fervour  remind  us  of  the  Catholic 
period  of  Corneille's  career.  In  our  own 
day  he  has  exercised  the  skill  of  a  crowd 
of  translators.     Shelley  gave  us  a  fine 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  lOI 

fragment  from  the  Magician;  Trench, 
M'Carthy,  and  others  have  tried  their 
hands  on  one  of  the  most  difficult  problems 
in  the  art  of  translation.  But  the  English 
reader  can  obtain  some  adequate  concep- 
tion of  Calderon  from  the  eight  plays  of 
which  an  admirably  poetic  version  has 
been  given  us  by  Edward  Fitzgerald,  the 
translator,  or  paraphrast,  of  Omar  Kay- 
yam.  If  Fitzgerald's  accuracy  had 
equalled  his  ingenuity,  he  might  claim 
the  very  first  place  amongst  modern 
translators.^  Auguste  Comte  had  so  high 

'  It  is  much  to  be  regretted  that  except 
t\xe  Mayor  of  Zalamea,  the  Wonder-working 
Magician,  and  Life  is  a  Dream,  the  two 
latter  in  the  second  series,  Fitzgerald 
deliberately  selected  the  less  important 
dramas.  The  seven  selected  by  Comte 
as  types  out  of  the  nearly  two  hundred 
surviving  pieces  are :  La  Vida  es  sueno, 
El  Alcalde  de  Zalamea,  A  secreto  agravio 


I02      THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS. 

an  opinion  of  the  Spanish  dramatists  that, 
in  the  midst  of  his  philosophic  labours, 
he  made  a  selection  of  twenty  plays  from 
different  poets,  a  work  edited  by  his 
friend,  J.  S.  Florez,  and  published  in 
Paris  in  1854  (Teatro  Espanol). 

One  production  of  the  Spanish  imagi- 
nation alone  has  obtained  universal  rank 
amongst  the  great  masterpieces  of  the 
world.  Cervantes  carried  to  the  highest 
point  that  pensive  and  prophetic  spirit 
which  seems  to  mark  all  the  greater 
humourists,  unless  it  be  Aristophanes  in 
his  wilder  moods.  Like  Eabelais  and 
Moliere,  like  Shakespeare  and  Fielding, 
Cervantes  is  ever  reminding  us,  in  the 
loudest  peals  of  our  mirth,  that  hfe  is 

secreta  venganza,  No  siempre  lo  peor  es 
cierto,  Mananas  de  abril  y  mayo,  La  Nave 
del  Mercader,  La  Vina  del  Seiior.  Of  these, 
the  first  and  second  have  been  translated 
by  Fitzgerald. 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.      I03 

full  of  mystery  and  of  struggle.  But 
none  of  these  profound  spirits  have 
handled  the  problems  of  life  with  greater 
breadth  or  more  noble  tenderness  than 
the  author  of  Don  Quixote.  This  inimi- 
table work  is  the  serio-comic  analogue  of 
Dante's  Vision.  It  is  a  burlesque  divine 
comedy  :  the  survey  of  human  society, 
its  types  of  character,  and  its  moral 
problems,  at  a  moment  when  one  great 
phase  of  history  was  giving  way  to 
another.  Of  this  glorious  work  we  now 
have  a  really  adequate  version  in  the 
admirable  translation  by  Mr.  J.  Ormsby. 
The  true  Don  Quixote  presents  to  us  the 
secular  contest  between  the  past  and  the 
present.  This  great  creation  is  as  much 
history  and  philosophy  as  it  is  romance 
or  comedy.  It  idealises  the  doubt  and 
wonder  bred  in  the  soul  of  its  heroic 
author,  a  soldier  at  once  of  the  old  world 
and  of  the  new,  one  who  united  the  cru- 
sading instinct  of  the  Cid  with  the  prac- 


I04  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

tical  genius  of  Moliere  ;  who  saw  clearly 
the  inevitable  conflict  between  the  old 
world  of  chivalry  and  the  new  world  of 
industry  and  science ;  and  sympathising 
with  both,  felt  a  clear  and  conscious  mis- 
sion to  announce  to  chivalry  its  inexora- 
ble doom,  teaching  the  new  world  withal 
what  it  lacked  of  chivalry  and  heroism. 
And,  uniting  in  himself  at  once  good 
sense  and  chivalry,  Cervantes  points  out 
to  us  at  last  a  possible  union  of  these 
two. 

The  poets  of  Germany  need  not  detain 
us.  Germany  has  indeed  but  one  great 
poet  of  European  rank,  the  encyclopaedic 
Goethe,  whose  exquisite  lyrics  and  the 
inexhaustible  Faust  are  a  constant  re- 
freshment to  the  thoughtful  spirit.  The 
wonderful  intellectual  impulse  which 
Goethe  gave  to  all  forms  of  literature  in 
his  generation,  doubtless  the  most  im- 
portant of  the  whole  nineteenth  century, 
has  caused  rather  an  excessive  than  a 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.      10$ 

deficient  estimate  of  his  direct  work  as  a 
poet.  The  other  German  poets  are  often 
graceful  and  learned  ;  we  read  them 
conscientiously  when  we  first  acquire 
the  language,  and  their  delightful  bal- 
lads continually  exercise  the  ingenu- 
ity of  translators,  both  domestic  and 
public.  But  except  to  the  lovely  lyrics 
of  Goethe  and  Heine,  I  venture  to  doubt 
if  many  of  us  return  to  them  with  in- 
creasing zest.  In  the  present  day  they 
get  possibly  an  even  excessive  attention 
from  those  who,  like  many  young  per- 
sons, have  never  read  a  line  of  Dante, 
Ariosto,  Chaucer,  or  Calderon. 

Of  our  English  poets  there  is  little  that 
needs  to  be  said,  all  the  more  that  a 
dominant  school  of  criticism  now  guides 
the  public  taste  in  this  matter  with  con- 
summate judgment ;  and  that  the  gen- 
eral interest  in  poetry  is  perhaps  at  once 
wider  and  more  healthy  than  it  has  ever 
been  at  any  period  of  our  history.    The 


lo6  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS, 

best  estimates  of  our  great  masterpieces 
have  been  reduced  to  a  popular  form  in 
the  admirable  hand  book  of  Mr.  S.  A. 
Brooke,  and  the  judgment  of  Mr.  Mat- 
thew Arnold  in  poetry  is  almost  as  much 
a  final  verdict  as  that  of  Sainte-Beuve 
himself.  Here  and  there  specialists  and 
partisans  worry  us  with  exaggeration 
and  hobbies  of  their  own.  But,  as  a 
rule,  the  position  of  the  greater  poets  is 
perfectly  established  and  clearly  under- 
stood. It  is  no  pretension  of  these  few 
pages  to  do  more  than  utter  a  few  words 
of  plea  for  reading  at  any  rate  the  best. 
Even  of  Shakespeare  himself  it  is  bet- 
ter to  recognise  frankly  the  truth,  that 
he  is  by  no  means  always  at  his  best, 
and  occasionly  produces  quite  unworthy 
stuff.  No  poet  known  to  us  was  so  care- 
less of  his  genius,  so  little  jealous  of  his 
own  work,  and  none  has  left  his  crea- 
tions in  a  form  so  unauthentic  and  con- 
fused ;  for  no  one  of  his  plays  was  pub- 


THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS.  I07 

lished  with  his  name  in  his  lifetime.  Let 
us  face  the  necessity,  that  it  is  better  in 
such  case  to  know  his  eight  or  ten 
masterpieces  thoroughly,  rather  than  to 
treat  his  thirty-six  supposed  pieces  with 
equal  irreverent  veneration.  "With  Mil- 
ton the  case  is  different.  In  the  Para- 
dise Lost  and  in  the  Lyrics — lyrics  un- 
surpassed in  all  poetry,  and  for  English- 
men, at  least,  the  high- water  mark  of 
lyrical  perfection,  equally  faultless  in 
their  poetic  form  and  in  their  moral 
charm,  the  poet  seems  to  be  putting  his 
whole  inspiration  into  every  line  and 
almost  every  phrase.  And  thus,  till  his 
strength  began  to  wane  with  life,  this 
most  self-possessed  of  the  poets  hardly 
ever  swerves  or  swoops  in  his  calm  ma- 
jestic flight. 

Of  our  poets,  and  especially  of  our 
modern  poets,  there  is  happily  now  but 
little  need  to  speak.  All  serious  readers 
are    suflBciently    agreed.      That  Burns, 


I08  THE   CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

Byron,  Shelley,  Keats,  and  Wordsworth 
belong,  each  in  his  way  and  each  in  his 
degree,  to  the  perpetual  glories  of  our 
literature,  is  no  longer  open  to  doubt. 
No  one  needs  any  pressing  to  read  Cole- 
ridge, Scott,  Tennyson,  and  Browning  ; 
they  have  all  enjoyed  an  ample,  almost 
an  excessive,  recognition  in  their  own 
lifetime.  But  a  little  word  may  be 
spoken  in  season  respecting  our  honored 
Laureate — a  word  which  the  critics  keep 
too  much  to  themselves.  There  is  danger 
lest  conventional  adulation  and  a  cer- 
tain unique  quality  of  his  may  tend  to 
mislead  the  general  public  as  to  the  true 
place  of  Tennyson  amongst  poets.  Since 
the  death  of  Wordsworth  he  has  stood, 
beyond  all  question,  in  a  class  wholly  by 
himself,  far  above  all  contemporary  lyric 
poets.  It  is  no  less  certain  that  he, 
alone  of  the  Victorians,  has  definitely 
entered  the  immortal  group  of  our  Eng- 
lish  poets,  and    stands    beside  Words- 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.      I09 

worth,  Coleridge,  and  Keats.  Nay,  we 
must  go  further  than  this.  Tennyson 
has  a  gift  of  melody  in  meditative  lyric, 
more  subtle  and  exquisite  than  any  poet 
but  Shakespeare  and  Shelley.  He  has, 
moreover,  a  curiosa  felicitas  of  phrase, 
a  finished  grace,  sustained  over  the 
whole  of  In  Memoriam^  which  is  pecu- 
liarly rare  in  English  poetry  ;  one  which 
reminds  us  of  the  unerring  certainty 
of  touch  in  Horace,  Racine,  Heine,  and 
Leopardi.  But  this  delightful  quality  is 
a  somewhat  late  product  of  any  litera- 
ture, and  is  seldom  found  with  equal 
power  of  imagination.  The  Laureate 
has  had  the  good  fortune  to  live  in  an 
epoch  of  amazing  fecundity,  and  to  em- 
body in  graceful  verse  the  originality 
and  fervour  of  an  original  and  fervid 
age.  The  young,  brimful  of  the  hopes 
and  feelings  which  teem  in  our  time,  are 
eager  to  hail  a  poet  who  is  in  many  ways 
to  the  cultivated  class  of  our  time  that 


no  THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS. 

which  Victor  Hugo  has  been  to  the 
French  people.  They  are  apt  to  forget 
that  a  unique  gift  of  melody  and  an  un- 
dertone of  sentimental  philosophising 
does  not  amount  to  imaginative  power 
of  the  very  first  rank.  When  we  survey 
calmly  the  more  ambitious  pieces  of  this 
exquisite  lyrist,  such  as  that  somewhat 
boudoir  epic,  the  Idylls  of  the  King ; 
the  conventional  dramas,  and  the  facile 
ballads  of  his  decline,  we  find  ourselves 
in  the  presence  of  a  mind  where  the 
power  of  expression  outweighs  the 
thought  :  one  that  can  strike  out  little 
of  a  really  high  type,  either  in  character, 
in  narration,  or  in  drama.  These  con- 
summately graceful  verses  have  none  of 
that  wealth  of  imagination,  that  flashing 
insight  into  life,  that  tragic  thunderpeal, 
which  often,  it  may  be,  with  far  less 
chastened  diction,  are  revealed  to  us  by 
the  mighty  spirits  of  Scott,  Byron,  and 
Goethe.     Let  us  read  our  Tennyson  and 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  Ill 

be  thankful,  without  supposing,  like 
some  young  ladies'  pet  curate,  that  this 
is  the  high -water  mark  of  English 
poetry. 

Finally,  as  to  prose  romances,  the  same 
principles  will  serve,  though  they  are 
even  more  difficult  to  apply.  Read  the 
best.  Our  great  eighteenth  century 
novelists  have  won  a  place  in  the  abid- 
ing literature  of  the  world — a  place  be- 
side the  poets  more  specially  so  called. 
Their  knowledge  of  human  nature,  their 
humour,  their  dramatic  skill,  their 
pathos,  make  them  peers  of  those  who 
hare  used  the  forms  of  verse,  and  it  is  in 
the  form  and  not  in  substance  that  they 
may  rank  below  the  masters  of  the  crea- 
tive art  in  verse.  First  among  them  all 
is  the  generous  soul  of  Fielding,  to  whom 
so  much  is  forgiven  for  the  nobleness  of 
his  great  heart.  On  him  and  on  the 
others  there  rests  the  curse  of  their  age, 
and  no  incantation  can  reverse  the  sen- 


112  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

tence  pronounced  upon  those  who  delib- 
erately stoop  to  the  unclean.  It  is  a 
grave  defect  in  the  splendid  tale  of  Tom 
Jones — of  all  prose  romances  the  most 
rich  in  life  and  the  most  artistic  in  con- 
struction— that  a  Bowdlerised  version  of 
it  would  be  hardly  intelligible  as  a  tale. 
Grossness,  alas  1  has  entered  into  the 
marrow  of  its  bones.  Happily,  vice  has 
not ;  and  amidst  much  that  is  repulsive, 
we  feel  the  good  man's  reverence  for 
goodness,  and  the  humane  spirit's  honour 
of  every  humane  quality,  whilst  the  pure 
figure  of  the  womanly  Sophia  (most  wo- 
manly of  all  women  in  fiction)  walks  in 
maiden  meditation  across  the  darkest 
scenes,  as  the  figure  of  the  glorified 
Gretchen  passes  across  the  revel  in  the 
Walpurgis-Nacht. 

The  same  century  too  gave  us  (and 
without  any  of  its  defects  two  im- 
mortal masterpieces  of  creative  art — 
the   exquisite  idyll    of    Goldsmith   and 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  II3 

the  original  conception  of  Defoe.  We 
are  so  familiar  with  the  Vicai'  of  Wake- 
field  and  Robinson  Crusoe  that  we  are 
too  ready  to  forget  their  extraordinary- 
influence  over  the  whole  European  mind. 
We  are  hardly  sensible  that  both  contain 
noble  lessons  for  every  age.  RoUnson 
Crusoe,  which  is  a  fairy  tale  to  the  child, 
a  book  of  adventure  to  the  young,  is  a 
work  on  social  philosophy  to  the  mature. 
It  is  a  picture  of  civilisation.  The  es- 
sential moral  attributes  of  man,  his  in- 
nate impulses  as  a  social  being,  his  ab- 
solute dependence  on  society,  even  as  a 
solitary  indi\idual,  his  subjection  to  the 
physical  world,  and  his  alliance  with  the 
animal  world,  the  statical  elements  of 
social  philosophy,  and  the  germs  of 
man's  historical  evolution  have  never 
been  touched  with  more  sagacity,  and 
assuredly  have  never  been  idealised  with 
such  magical  simplicity  and  truth.  It 
remains,   with    Don    Quixote,  the  only 


114      THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS. 

prose  work  of  the  fancy  which  has  equal 
charms  for  every  age  of  life,  and  which 
has  inexhaustible  teaching  for  the  stu- 
dent of  man  and  of  society. 

Of  "Walter  Scott  one  need  as  little 
speak  as  of  Shakespeare.  He  belongs  to 
mankind,  to  every  age  and  race,  and  he 
certainly  must  be  counted  as  in  the  first 
line  of  the  great  creative  minds  of  the 
world.  His  unique  glory  is  to  have 
definitely  succeeded  in  the  ideal  repro- 
duction of  historical  types,  so  as  to  pre- 
serve at  once  beauty,  life,  and  truth,  a 
task  which  neither  Ariosto  and  Tasso, 
nor  Corneille  and  Racine,  nor  Alfieri, 
nor  Goethe  and  Schiller — no  !  nor  even 
Shakespeare  himself  entirely  achieved. 
It  is  true  that  their  instrument  was  the 
more  exacting  one  of  verse,  whilst  Scott's 
was  prose.  But  in  brilliancy  of  concep- 
tion, in  wealth  of  character,  in  dramatic 
art,  in  glow  and  harmony  of  colour, 
Scott  put  forth  all  the  powers  of  a  mas- 


THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS.  II5 

ter  poet.  His  too  early  death,  like  that 
of  Shakespeare,  leaves  on  us  a  cruel 
sense  of  the  inexhaustible  quality  of  his 
imagination.  Prodigious  excess  in  work 
destroyed  in  full  maturity  that  splendid 
brain,  and  to  the  last  he  had  magnifi- 
cent bursts  of  his  old  power.  But  for 
this  the  imagination  of  Scott  might  have 
continued  to  range  over  the  boundless 
field  of  human  history.  "What  we  have 
is  mainly  of  the  Middle  Ages,  the  genius 
of  chivalry  in  all  its  colour  and  moral 
beauty  ;  but  he  had  no  exclusive  spirit 
and  no  crude  doctrines.  And  as  Cer- 
vantes is  ever  reminding  us  how  much 
of  the  mediaeval  chivalry  was  doomed, 
so  Scott,  whilst  singing  the  same  plain- 
tive death-chant,  is  for  ever  reminding 
us  how  much  of  it  is  destined  to  endure. 
The  genius  of  Scott  has  raised  up  a 
school  of  historical  romance  ;  and  though 
the  best  work  of  Chateaubriand,  Man- 
zoni,  and  Buhver  may  take  rank  as  true 


Il6  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

art,  the  endless  crowd  of  inferior  imita- 
tions are  nothing  but  a  weariness  to  the 
flesh.  A  far  higher  place  in  the  perma- 
nent field  of  beauty  belongs  to  the  work 
of  Miss  Edgeworth,  Miss  Austen,  and 
George  Eliot,  who  have  founded  a  new 
school  of  romantic  art,  with  the  subtle 
observation,  the  delicate  shades  of  char- 
acter, and  the  indescribable  finesse  pecu- 
liarly adapted  to  women's  work.  These 
admirable  pictures  of  society  hold  a  rare 
and  abiding  place  in  English  literature. 

But  assuredly  black  night  will  quickly 
cover  the  vast  bulk  of  modern  fiction — 
work  as  perishable  as  the  generations 
whose  idleness  it  has  amused.  It  be- 
longs not  to  the  great  creations  of  the 
world.  Beside  them  it  is  flat  and  poor. 
Such  facts  in  human  nature  as  it  reveals 
are  trivial  and  special  in  themselves,  and 
for  the  most  part  abnormal  and  unwhole- 
some. I  stand  beside  the  ceaseless  flow 
of   this   miscellaneous  torrent   as    one 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  II7 

stands  watching  the  turbid  rush  of 
Thames  at  London  Bridge,  wondering 
whence  it  all  comes,  whither  it  all  goes, 
what  can  be  done  with  it,  and  what 
may  be  its  ultimate  function  in  the  order 
of  providence.  To  a  reader  who  would 
nourish  his  taste  on  the  boundless  har- 
vests of  the  poetry  of  mankind,  this 
sewage  outfall  of  to-day  offers  as  little  in 
creative  as  in  moral  value.  Lurid  and 
irregular  streaks  of  imagination,  extrav- 
agance of  plot  and  incident,  petty  and 
mean  subjects  of  study,  forced  and  un- 
natural situations,  morbid  pathology  of 
crime,  dull  copying  of  the  dullest  com- 
monplace, melodramatic  hurly  -  burly, 
form  the  certain  evidence  of  an  art  that 
is  exhausted,  produced  by  men  and 
women  to  whom  it  is  become  a  mere 
trade,  in  an  age  wherein  change  and  ex- 
citement have  corrupted  the  power  of 
pure  enjoyment. 
Genius,   industry,  subtlety,   and   in- 


Il8  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

genuity  have  (it  must  yet  be  acknowl- 
edged) thrown  their  best  into  the  fiction 
of  to-day  ;  and  not  a  few  works  of  un- 
deniable brilliancy  and  vigour  have  been 
produced.  Of  course  everybody  reads, 
and  every  one  enjoys,  Dickens,  Thack- 
eray, Bulwer,  the  Brontes,  Trollope, 
George  Eliot.  Far  be  it  from  any  man, 
even  the  severest  student,  to  eschew 
them.  There  are  no  doubt  typical  works 
of  theirs  which  will  ultimately  be  recog- 
nised as  within  the  immortal  cycle  of 
English  literature,  in  the  nobler  sense  of 
this  term.  He  would  be  a  bold  man 
who  should  say  that  PicTiivick  and  Van- 
ity Fair,  the  Last  Days  of  Pompeii  and 
Jane  Eyre,  the  Last  Chronicle  of  Barset 
and  Silas  Marner,  will  never  take  rank 
in  the  roll  which  opens  with  Tom  Jones 
and  Clarissa,  the  Vicar  and  Tristram 
Shandy.  It  may  be  that  the  future  will 
find  in  them  insight  into  nature  and 
beauty  of  creative  form,  such  as  belongs 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  II9 

to  the  order  of  all  high  imaginative  art. 
But  as  yet  we  are  too  near  and  too  little 
dispassionate  to  decide  this  matter  to- 
day. And,  in  the  meantime,  the  indis- 
criminate zest  for  these  delightful  writers 
of  our  age  too  often  dulls  our  taste  for 
the  undoubted  masters  of  the  world. 

Certain  it  is  that  much,  very  much, 
of  these  fascinating  moderns  has  neither 
the  stamp  of  abiding  beauty,  nor  the 
saving  grace  of  moral  truth.  Dickens, 
alas !  soon  passed  into  a  mannerism  of 
artificial  whimsicalities,  alternating  with 
shallow  melodrama.  Thackeray  wearies 
his  best  lovers  by  a  cynical  monotony 
of  meanness.  By  grace  of  a  very  rare 
genius,  the  best  work  of  the  Brontes  is 
saved,  as  by  fire,  out  of  the  repulsive 
sensationalism  they  started,  destined  to 
perish  in  shilling  dreadfuls.  TroUope 
only  now  and  then  rises,  as  by  a  miracle, 
out  of  his  craft  as  an  industrious  re- 
corder of  pleasant  commonplace.     And 


I20  THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS. 

even  George  Eliot,  conscientious  artist 
as  she  is,  too  often  wrote  as  if  she  were 
sinking  under  the  effort  to  live  up  to  her 
early  reputation.  On  all  of  these  the 
special  evils  of  their  time  weigh  more  or 
less.  They  write  too  often  as  if  it  were 
their  publishers  and  not  their  genius 
w^hich  prompted  the  work  ;  or  as  if  their 
task  were  to  provide  a  new  set  of  puzzles 
in  rare  psychological  problems. 

In  romance  every  one  can  write  some- 
thing ;  clever  men  and  women  can  write 
smart  things,  extremely  clever  men  and 
women  can  write  remarkable  things. 
And  thus,  whilst  so  large  a  part  of  the 
educated  world  writes  fiction,  what  we 
get  even  from  the  best  is  too  often  sensa- 
tional, morbid,  sardonic,  artificial,  trivial, 
or  mean.  We  all  read  them  and  shall 
continue  to  read  them ;  and  thousands 
of  tales  which  have  far  inferior  quality. 
But  they  lack  the  moral  and  social  in- 
sight of  true  romance.     They  are  not  the 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.      121 

stuff  of  which  our  daily  reading  should 
consist.  They  are  destined  for  the  most 
part  to  a  not  very  distant  oblivion. 
When  a  regular  training  of  the  poetic 
capacity  shall  have  become  general,  their 
enormous  vogue  will  be  over.  In  the 
meantime  let  each  of  us  deal  with  them 
as  he  finds  right,  remembering  this,  that 
they  can  hardly  claim  a  place  as  an  in- 
dispensable part  of  our  serious  education. 
In  substance  the  same  thing  holds 
good  of  the  foreign  romances  of  our  own 
generation.  Neither  German,  Italian, 
nor  Spanish  fiction,  so  far  as  I  know,  can 
pretend  to  a  place  beside  the  modern  fic- 
tion of  England  and  France.  And  he 
would  be  a  bold  patriot  who  should  rank 
the  fiction  of  England,  since  the  death  of 
Scott,  above  that  of  Victor  Hugo,  George 
Sand,  Balzac,  Merimee,  Theophile  Gau- 
tier,  and  Dumas.  But  the  wonderful 
powers  of  all  these  are  unhappily  coun- 
terbalanced by  the  defects  of  their  quali- 


122  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

ties.  If  Victor  Hugo  be  in  the  sum  the 
greatest  European  literary  force  since 
Goethe  and  Scott,  the  readers  of  his  prose 
have  too  often  to  suffer  from  rank  stage 
balderdash.  Balzac  wearies  us  all  by  a 
sardonic  monotony  of  wickedness;  George 
Sand  by  an  unwomanly  proneness  to 
idealise  lust.  Notre  Dame  and  Les  Mi- 
serables,  Pere  Ooriot  and  Eugenie  Giran- 
det,  Consuelo  and  La  Mare  aux  Biables, 
Capitaine  Fracasse  and  Vingt  Ans  Apres 
are  books  of  extraordinary  vigour  ;  but 
it  would  seem  to  me  treason  against  art 
to  rank  even  the  best  of  them  with  im- 
mortal masterpieces,  such  as  Tom  Jones 
and  the  Vicar  of  Wakefield. 

Contemporary  English  romance,  how- 
ever insipid  and  crude  in  art,  is  usually 
wholesome,  or  at  worst  harmless  ;  but 
what  words  remain  for  the  typical  French 
novel  which  at  present  fills  the  place  of 
reading  to  so  large  a  part  of  educated 
Europe?    By  the  accident  of  language 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  1 23 

the  French  novel  is  written,  not  for 
Frenchmen,  but  for  all  men  of  culture 
and  leisure ;  its  world  is  not  the  real 
world  of  Frenchmen  at  all,  but  an  arti- 
ficial world  of  cosmopolitan  origin,  which 
has  its  conventional  home  on  the  boule- 
vards ;  its  writers  are  not  the  leaders  of 
French  literature,  but  a  special  school 
of  feuilletonists.  It  is  intensely  smart, 
diabolically  ingenious,  and  with  a  really 
masterly  command  of  its  own  peculiar 
style  and  method.  Beside  it  the  raw 
stuff  which  dribbles  incessantly  into  the 
circulating  libraries  of  England,  Ger 
many,  and  America,  is  the  work  of  ama- 
teurs who  are  still  learning  the  difficul- 
ties of  their  own  trade.  But  with  all 
this  skill,  it  is  to  me  even  more  unread- 
able. The  contortions  it  makes  in  its 
efforts  to  twist  out  novel  situations;  the 
mere  literary  knowingness,  the  monot- 
onous variations  on  its  one  string  of 
adultery — adultery  without  love,   senti- 


124  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

ment,  or  excuse ;  a  purely  conventional 
and  feuilleton  kind  of  adultery,  existing 
nowhere  in  nature,  unless  it  be  in  some 
gambling  centre  of  blackguardly  "high 
hfe  ;"  its  want  of  any  trace  of  what  can 
be  justly  regarded  as  real  art,  or  as  real 
human  nature  —  all  these  make  the 
"  French  novel "  to  me  more  unapproach- 
able than  a  Leipsic  edition  of  the  Apos- 
tolic Fathers.  Men  of  brains  and  knowl- 
edge read  it — read  it,  we  know,  daily ; 
just  as  they  smoke  cavendish,  and  as  the 
French  subaltern  takes  absinthe.  But 
no  one  enjoys  it.  Non  ragioniam  di  lor, 
non  guarda,  ma  passa.  To  be  addicted 
to  it,  is  a  vice  ;  to  manufacture  it,  is  a 
crime.  They  are  not  books,  these  things. 
To  imbibe  this  compound,  is  not  to  read. 
In  Europe,  as  in  England,  Walter 
Scott  remains  as  yet  the  last  in  the  series 
of  the  great  creative  spirits  of  the  human 
race.  No  one  of  his  successors,  however 
clear  be  the  genius  and  the  partial  sue- 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.      12$ 

cess  of  some  of  them,  belongs  to  the 
same  grand  type  of  mind,  or  has  now  a 
lasting  place  in  the  roll  of  the  immortals. 
It  should  make  us  sad  to  reflect  that  a 
generation,  which  already  has  begun  to 
treat  Scott  with  the  indifference  that  is 
the  lot  of  a  "  a  classic,"  should  be  ready 
to  fill  its  insatiable  maw  with  the  ephem- 
eral wares  of  the  booksellers,  and  the 
reeking  garbage  of  the  boulevard. 

We  all  read  Scott's  romances,  as  we 
have  all  read  Hume's  History  of  England; 
but  how  often  do  we  read  them,  how 
zealously,  with  what  sympathy  and 
understanding?  I  am  told  that  the 
last  discovery  of  modern  culture  is  that 
Scott's  prose  is  commonplace  ;  that  the 
young  men  at  our  universities  are  far  too 
critical  to  care  for  his  artless  sentences 
and  flowing  descriptions.  They  prefer 
Mr.  Swinburne,  Mr.  Mallock,  and  the 
Euphuism  of  young  Oxford,  just  as  some 
people  prefer  a  Dresden  Shepherdess  to 


126      THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

the  Caryatides  of  the  Erechtheum,  pro- 
nounce Fielding  to  be  low,  and  Mozart  to 
be  passe.  As  boys  love  loUypops,  so 
these  juvenile  fops  love  to  roll  phrases 
about  under  the  tongue,  as  if  phrases  in 
themselves  had  a  value  apart  from 
thoughts,  feelings,  great  conceptions,  or 
human  sympathy.  For  Scott  is  just  one 
of  the  poets  (we  may  call  poets  all  the 
great  creators  in  prose  or  in  verse)  of 
whom  one  never  wearies,  just  as  one  can 
listen  to  Beethoven,  or  watch  the  sunrise 
or  the  sunset  day  by  day  with  new  de- 
light. I  think  I  can  read  the  Antiquary 
or  the  Bride  of  Lammermoor^  IvanhoCj 
Quentin  Diirward,  and  Old  Mortality 
at  least  once  a  year  afresh. 

Scott  is  a  perfect  library  in  himself. 
A  constant  reader  of  romances  would 
find  that  it  needed  months  to  go  through 
even  the  best  pieces  of  the  inexhaustible 
painter  of  eight  full  centuries  and  every 
type  of  man;  and  he  might   repeat  the 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  \2^ 

process  of  reading  him  ten  times  in  a 
lifetime  without  a  sense  of  fatigue  or 
sameness.  The  poetic  beauty  of  Scott's 
creations  is  almost  the  least  of  his  great 
qualities.  It  is  the  universality  of  his 
sympathy  that  is  so  truly  great,  the  jus- 
tice of  his  estimates,  the  insight  into  the 
spirit  of  each  age,  his  intense  absorption 
of  self  in  the  vatst  epic  of  human  civilisa- 
tion. What  are  the  old  almanacs  that 
they  so  often  give  us  as  histories  beside 
these  living  pictures  of  the  ordered  suc- 
cession of  ages  ?  As  in  Homer  himself, 
we  see  in  this  prose  Iliad  of  modern  his- 
tory, the  battle  of  the  old  and  the  new, 
the  heroic  defence  of  ancient  strongholds, 
the  long  impending  and  inevitable  doom 
of  mediaeval  life.  Strong  men  and  proud 
women  struggle  against  the  destiny  of 
modern  society,  unconsciously  working 
out  its  ways,  undauntedly  defying  its 
power.  How  just  is  our  island  Homer  ! 
Neither  Greek  nor  Trojan  sways  him  ; 


128  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

Achilles  is  his  hero ;  Hector  is  his  fa- 
vorite ;  he  loves  the  counsels  of  chiefs, 
and  the  palace  of  Priam;  but  the  swine- 
herd, the  charioteer,  the  slave  girl,  the 
hound,  the  beggar,  and  the  herdsman, 
all  glow  alike  in  the  harmonious  coloring 
of  his  peopled  epic.  We  see  the  dawn  of 
our  English  nation,  the  defence  of  Christ- 
endom against  the  Koran,  the  grace 
and  the  terror  of  feudalism,  the  rise  of 
monarchy  out  of  baronies,  the  rise 
of  parliaments  out  of  monarchy,  the 
rise  of  industry  out  of  serfage,  the 
pathetic  ruin  of  chivalry,  the  splendid 
death-struggle  of  Catholicism,  the  sylvan 
tribes  of  the  mountain  (remnants  of  our 
pre-historic  forefathers)  beating  them- 
selves to  pieces  against  the  hard  advance 
of  modern  industry ;  we  see  the  grim  hero- 
ism of  the  Bible-martyrs,  the  catastrophe 
of  feudalism  overwhelmed  by  a  prac- 
tical age  which  knew  little  of  its  graces 
and  almost  nothing  of  its  virtues.     Such 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  1 29 

is  Scott,  who,  we  may  say,  has  done  for 
the  various  phases  of  modern  history, 
what  Shakespeare  has  done  for  the 
manifold  types  of  human  character. 
And  this  glorious  and  most  human  and 
most  historical  of  poets,  without  whom 
our  very  conception  of  human  develop- 
ment would  have  ever  been  imperfect, 
this  manliest,  and  truest,  and  widest,  of 
romances  we  neglect  for  some  hothouse 
hybrid  of  psychological  analysis,  for  the 
wretched  imitators  of  Balzac,  and  the 
jackanapes  phrasemongering  of  some 
Osric  of  the  day,  who  assures  us  that 
Scott  is  an  absolute  Philistine. 


130  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 


CHAPTER  IV. 

THE  MISUSE  OF  BOOKS. 

In  speaking  with  enthusiasm  of  Scott, 
as  of  Homer,  or  of  Shakespeare,  or  of 
Milton,  or  of  any  of  the  accepted  masters 
of  the  world,  I  have  no  wish  to  insist 
dogmatically  upon  any  single  name,  or 
two  or  three  in  particular.  Our  enjoy- 
ment and  reverence  of  the  great  poets  of 
the  world  is  seriously  injured  nowadays 
by  the  habit  we  get  of  singling  out  some 
particular  quality,  some  particular  school 
of  art,  for  intemperate  praise,  or,  still 
worse,  for  intemperate  abuse.  Mr.  Rus- 
kin,  I  suppose,  is  answerable  for  the 
taste  for  this  one-sided  and  spasmodic 
criticism;  he  asks  readers  to  cast  aside 
Coleridge,  Shelley,  and  Byron,  and  to 
stick   to — such   goody-goody    verses    as 


THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS.      I3I 

Evangeline  and  the  Angel  in  the  House. 
And  now  every  young  gentleman  who 
has  the  trick  of  a  few  adjectives  will 
languidly  vow  that  Marlowe  is  supreme, 
or  Murillo  foul.  It  is  the  mark  of  ra- 
tional criticism,  as  well  as  of  healthy 
thought,  to  maintain  an  evenness  of 
mind  in  judging  of  great  works,  to  recog- 
nise great  qualities  in  due  proportion,  to 
feel  that  defects  are  made  up  by  beau- 
ties, and  beauties  are  often  balanced  by 
weakness.  The  true  judgment  implies  a 
weighing  of  each  work  and  each  work- 
man as  a  whole,  in  relation  to  the  sum 
of  human  cultivation  and  the  gradual 
advance  of  the  movement  of  ages.  And 
in  this  matter  we  shall  usually  find  that 
the  world  is  right,  the  world  of  the 
modern  centuries  and  the  nations  of 
Europe  together.  It  is  unlikely,  to  say 
the  least  of  it,  that  a  young  person  who 
has  hardly  ceased  making  Latin  verses 
will  be  able  to  reverse  the  decisions  of 


132  THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS. 

the  civilised  world;  and  it  is  even  more 
unlikely  that  Milton  and  Moliere,  Field- 
ing and  Scott,  will  ever  be  displaced  by 
a  poet  who  has  unaccountably  lain  hid 
for  one  or  two  centuries.     I  know,  that 
in  the  style  of  to-day,  I  ought  hardly  to 
venture  to  speak  about  poetry  unless  I 
am  prepared  to  unfold  the  mysterious 
beauties  of  some  unknown  genius  who 
has    recently  been    unearthed    by    the 
Children   of  Light    and    Sweetness.     I 
confess  I  have  no  such  discovery  to  an- 
nounce.    I  prefer  to  dwell  in  Gath  and 
to    pitch  my   tents  in   Ashdod;   and  I 
doubt  the  use  of  the  sling  as  a  weapon 
in  modern   war.     I  decline  to  go  into 
hyperbolic   eccentricities  over  unknown 
geniuses,  and  a  single  quality  or  power 
is  not  enough  to  rouse  my  enthusiasm. 
It  is  possible  that  no  master  ever  painted 
a  buttercup  like  this  one,  or  the  fringe 
of  a  robe  like  that  one;  that  this  poet 
has  a  unique  subtlety,  and  that  an  unde- 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  1 33 

finable  music.  I  am  still  unconvinced, 
though  the  man  who  cannot  see  it,  we 
are  told,  should  at  once  retire  to  the 
place  where  there  is  wailing  and  gnash- 
ing of  teeth. 

I  am  against  all  gnashing  of  teeth, 
whether  for  or  against  a  particular  idol. 
I  stand  by  the  men,  and  by  all  the  men, 
who  have  moved  mankind  to  the  depths 
of  their  souls,  who  have  taught  genera- 
tions, and  formed  our  life.  If  I  say  of 
Scott,  that  to  have  drunk  in  the  whole  of 
his  glorious  spirit  is  a  liberal  education 
in  itself,  I  am  asking  for  no  exclusive  de- 
votion to  Scott,  to  any  poet,  or  any  school 
of  poets,  or  any  age,  or  any  country,  to 
any  style  or  any  order  of  poet,  one  more 
than  another.  They  are  as  various,  for- 
tunately, and  as  many-sided  as  human 
nature  itself.  If  I  delight  in  Scott,  I 
love  Fielding,  and  Richardson,  and 
Sterne,  and  Goldsmith,  and  Defoe. 
Yes,  and  I  will  add  Cooper  and  Marryat, 


134  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

Miss  Edgeworth  and  Miss  Austen — to 
confine  myself  to  those  who  are  already 
classics,  to  our  own  language,  and  to 
one  form  of  art  alone,  and  not  to  venture 
on  the  ground  of  contemporary  romance 
in  general.  What  I  have  said  of  Homer, 
I  would  say  in  a  degree,  but  somewhat 
lower,  of  those  great  ancients  who  are 
the  most  accessible  to  us  in  English— 
^schylus,  Aristophanes,  Virgil,  and 
Horace.  We  need  not  so  worship  Shake- 
speare as  to  neglect  Calderon,  Molifere, 
Corneille,  Kacine,  Voltaire,  Alfieri, 
Goethe,  those  dramatists,  in  many  forms, 
and  with  genius  the  most  diverse,  who 
have  so  steadily  set  themselves  to  ideal- 
ise the  great  types  of  public  life  and  of 
the  phases  of  human  history.  What  I 
have  said  of  Milton  I  would  say  of  Dante, 
of  Ariosto,  of  Petrarch,  and  of  Tasso ; 
and  in  a  measure  I  would  say  it  of  Boc- 
caccio and  Chaucer,  of  Camoens  and 
Spenser,  of  Kabelais  and  of  Cervantes, 


THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS.  I35 

of  Gil  Bias  and  the  Vicar  of  Wakefield, 
of  Byron  and  of  Shelley,  of  Goethe  and 
of  Schiller. 

I  protest  that  I  am  devoted  to  no 
school  in  particular :  I  condemn  no 
school,  I  reject  none.  I  am  for  the 
school  of  all  the  great  men  ;  and  I  am 
against  the  school  of  the  smaller  men.  I 
care  for  Wordsworth  as  well  as  for  By- 
ron, for  Burns  as  well  as  Shelley,  for 
Boccaccio  as  well  as  for  Milton,  for  Bun- 
yan  as  well  as  Eabelais,  for  Cervantes  as 
well  as  for  Dante,  for  Corneille  as  well 
as  for  Shakespeare,  for  Goldsmith  as 
well  as  Goethe.  I  stand  by  the  sentence 
of  the  world  ;  and  I  hold  that  in  a  mat- 
ter so  human  and  so  broad  as  the  high- 
est poetry  the  judgment  of  the  nations  of 
Europe  is  pretty  w^ell  settled,  at  any  rate 
after  a  century  or  two  of  continuous 
reading  and  discussing.  Let  those  who 
will  assure  us  that  no  one  can  pretend  to 
culture,  unless  he  swear  by  Fra  Angelico 


136  THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS. 

and  Sandro  Botticelli,  by  Arnolpho  the 
son  of  Lapo,  or  the  Lombardic  bricklay- 
ers, by  Martini  and  Galuppi  (all,  by  the 
way,  admirable  men  of  the  second  rank) ; 
and  so,  in  literature  and  poetry,  there 
are  some  who  will  hear  of  nothing  but 
"Webster  or  Marlowe  ;  Blake,  Herrick,  or 
Villon  ;  William  Langland  or  the  Earl  of 
Surrey  ;  Guido  Cavalcanti  or  Omar  Kay- 
yam.  All  of  these  are  men  of  genius, 
and  each  with  a  special  and  inimitable 
gift  of  his  own.  But  the  busy  world, 
which  does  not  hunt  poets  as  collectors 
hunt  for  curios,  may  fairly  reserve  these 
lesser  lights  for  the  time  when  they  know 
the  greatest  well. 

So,  I  say,  think  mainly  of  the  greatest, 
of  the  best  known,  of  those  who  cover 
the  largest  area  of  human  history  and 
man's  common  nature.  Now  when  we 
come  to  count  up  these  poets  accepted  by 
the  unanimous  voice  of  Europe,  we  have 
some  thirty  or  forty  names,  and  amongst 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  1 37 

them  are  some  of  the  most  voluminous 
of  writers.  I  have  been  running  over 
but  one  department  of  literature  alone — 
the  poetic.  I  have  been  naming  those 
only,  whose  names  are  household  words 
with  us,  and  the  poets  for  the  most  part 
of  modern  Europe.  Yet  even  here  we 
have  a  list  which  is  usually  found  in  not 
less  than  a  hundred  volumes  at  least. 
Now  poetry  and  the  highest  kind  of  ro- 
mance are  exactly  that  order  of  literature 
which  not  only  will  bear  to  be  read  many 
times,  but  that  of  which  the  true  value 
can  only  be  gained  by  frequent,  and  in- 
deed habitual,  reading.  A  man  can 
hardly  be  said  to  know  the  12th  Mass  or 
the  9th  Symphony,  by  virtue  of  having 
once  heard  them  played  ten  years  ago ; 
he  can  hardly  be  said  to  take  air  and  ex- 
ercise because  he  took  a  country  walk 
once  last  autumn.  And  so,  he  can  hardly 
be  said  to  know  Scott  or  Shakespeare, 
Moliere  or  Cervantes,  when  he  once  read 


138  THE   CHOICE   OF  BOOKS. 

them  since  the  close  of  his  schooldays, 
or  amidst  the  daily  grind  of  his  profes- 
sional life.  The  immortal  and  universal 
poets  of  our  race  are  to  be  read  and  re- 
read till  their  music  and  their  spirit  are 
a  part  of  our  nature  ;  they  are  to  be 
thought  over  and  digested  till  we  live  in 
the  world  they  created  for  us  ;  they  are 
to  be  read  devoutly,  as  devout  men  read 
their  Bible  and  fortify  their  hearts  with 
psalms.  For  as  the  old  Hebrew  singer 
heard  the  heavens  declare  the  glory  of 
their  Maker,  and  the  firmament  showing 
his  handiwork,  so  in  the  long  roll  of  poe- 
try we  see  transfigured  the  strength  and 
beauty  of  humanity,  the  joys  and  sor- 
rows, the  dignity  and  struggles,  the  long 
life-history  of  our  common  kind. 

I  have  said  but  little  of  the  more  diffi- 
cult poetry,  and  the  religious  meditations 
of  the  great  idealists  in  prose  and  verse, 
whom  it  needs  a  concentrated  study  to 
master.     Some  of  these  are  hard  to  all 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  1 39 

men,  and  at  all  seasons.  The  Divine 
Comedy,  in  its  way,  reaches  as  deep  in 
its  thoughtfulness  as  Descartes  himself. 
But  these  books,  if  they  are  difficult  to 
all,  are  impossible  to  the  gluttons  of  the 
circulating  library.  To  these  munchers 
of  vapid  memoirs  and  monotonous  tales 
such  books  are  closed  indeed.  The 
power  of  enjoyment  and  of  understand- 
ing is  withered  up  within  them.  To  the 
besotted  gambler  on  the  turf  the  lonely 
hillside  glowing  with  heather  grows  to 
be  as  dreary  as  a  prison  ;  and  so,  too,  a 
man  may  listen  nightly  to  burlesques, 
till  Fidelio  inflicts  on  him  intolerable 
fatigue.  One  may  be  a  devourer  of 
books,  and  be  actually  incapable  of  read- 
ing a  hundred  lines  of  the  wisest  and  the 
most  beautiful.  To  read  one  of  such 
books  comes  only  by  habit,  as  prayer  is 
impossible  to  one  who  habitually  dreads 
to  be  alone. 
In  an  age  of  steam  it  seems  almost 


I40  THE   CHOICE   OF  BOOKS. 

idle  to  speak  of  Dante,  the  most  pro- 
found, the  most  meditative,  the  most 
prophetic  of  all  poets,  in  whose  epic  the 
panorama  of  mediaeval  life,  of  feudalism 
at  its  best,  and  Christianity  at  its  best, 
stands,  as  in  a  microcosm,  transfigured, 
judged,  and  measured.  To  most  men 
the  Paradise  Lost,  with  all  its  mighty- 
music  and  its  idyllic  pictures  of  human 
nature,  of  our  first  child-parents  in  their 
naked  purity  and  their  awakening 
thought,  is  a  serious  and  ungrateful 
task — not  to  be  ranked  with  the  simple 
enjoyments  ;  it  is  a  possession  to  be  ac- 
quired only  by  habit.  The  great  relig- 
ious poets,  the  imaginative  teachers  of 
the  heart,  are  never  easy  reading.  But 
the  reading  of  them  is  a  religious  habit, 
rather  than  an  intellectual  effort.  I 
pretend  not  to  be  dealing  with  a  matter 
so  deep  and  high  as  religion,  or  indeed 
with  education  in  the  fuller  sense.  I 
will  say  nothing  of  that  side  of  reading 


THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS.  I41 

which  is  really  hard  study,  an  effort  of 
duty,  matter  of  meditation  and  reveren- 
tial thought.  I  need  speak  not  of  such 
reading  as  that  of  the  Bible  ;  the  moral 
reflections  of  Socrates,  of  Aristotle,  of 
Confucius  ;  the  CoJifessions  of  St.  Au- 
gustine and  the  Citt/  of  God;  the  dis- 
courses of  St.  Bernard,  of  Bossuet,  of 
Bishop  Butler,  of  Jeremy  Taylor ;  the 
vast  philosophical  visions  that  were 
opened  to  the  eyes  of  Bacon  and  Des- 
cartes ;  the  thoughts  of  Pascal  and  Vau- 
venargues,  of  Diderot  and  Hume,  of 
Condorcet  and  de  Maistre  ;  the  problem 
of  man's  nature  as  it  is  told  in  the  Ex- 
cursion, or  in  Faust,  in  Cain,  or  in  the 
Pilgrim'' s  Progress;  the  unsearchable 
outpouring  of  the  heart  in  the  great 
mystics  of  many  ages  and  many  races  ; 
be  the  mysticism  that  of  David  or  of 
John  ;  of  Mahomet  or  of  Bouddha  ;  of 
Fenelon  or  of  Shelley  ;  of  a  Kempis  or 
of  Goethe. 


142  THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS. 

I  pass  by  all  these.  For  I  am  speak- 
ing now  of  the  use  of  books  in  our  leisure 
hours.  I  will  take  the  books  of  simple 
enjoyment,  books  that  one  can  laugh 
over  and  weep  over;  and  learn  from, 
and  laugh  or  weep  again;  which  have  in 
them  humour,  truth,  human  nature  in 
all  its  sides,  pictures  of  the  great  phases 
of  human  history ;  and  withal  sound 
teaching  in  honesty,  manliness,  gentle- 
ness, patience.  Of  such  books,  I  say, 
books  accepted  by  the  voice  of  all  man- 
kind as  matchless  and  immortal,  there 
is  a  complete  library  at  hand  for  every 
man,  in  his  every  mood,  whatever  his 
tastes  or  his  acquirements.  To  know 
merely  the  hundred  volumes  or  so  of 
which  I  have  spoken  would  involve  the 
study  of  years.  But  who  can  say  that 
these  books  are  read  as  they  might  bo, 
that  we  do  not  neglect  them  for  some- 
thing in  a  new  cover,  or  which  catches 
our  eye  in  a  library  ?    It  is  not  merely  to 


THE  CHOICE   OF  BOOKS.  I43 

the  idle  and  unreading  world  that  this 
complaint  holds  good.  It  is  the  insatia- 
ble readers  themselves  who  so  often  read 
to  the  least  profit.  Of  course  they  have 
read  all  these  household  books  many- 
years  ago,  read  them,  and  judged  them, 
and  put  them  away  for  ever.  They  will 
read  infinite  dissertations  about  these 
authors  ;  they  will  write  you  essays  on 
their  works  ;  they  will  talk  most  learned 
criticism  about  them.  But  it  never 
occurs  to  them  that  such  books  have  a 
daily  and  perpetual  value,  such  as  the 
devout  Christian  finds  in  his  morning 
and  evening  psalm;  that  the  music  of 
them  has  to  sink  into  the  soul  by  con- 
tinual reiicwal ;  that  we  have  to  live 
with  them  and  in  them,  till  their  ideal 
world  habitually  surrounds  us  in  the 
midst  of  the  real  world  ;  that  their  great 
thoughts  have  to  stir  us  daily  anew,  and 
their  generous  passion  has  to  warm  us 
hour  by  hour ;  just  as  we  need  each  day 


144  THE  CHOICE   OP  BOOKS. 

to  have  our  eyes  filled  by  the  light  of 
heaven,  and  our  blood  warmed  by  the 
glow  of  the  sun.  I  vow  that,  when  I  see 
men,  forgetful  of  the  perennial  poetry 
of  the  world,  muckraking  in  a  litter  of 
fugitive  refuse,  I  think  of  that  wonder- 
ful scene  in  the  Filgrim''s  Progress, 
where  the  Interpreter  shows  the  way- 
farers the  old  man  raking  in  the  straw 
and  dust,  whilst  he  will  not  see  the 
Angel  who  oifers  him  a  crown  of  gold 
and  precious  stones. 

This  gold,  refined  beyond  the  standard 
of  the  goldsmith,  these  pearls  of  great 
price,  the  united  voice  of  mankind  has 
assured  us  are  found  in  those  immortal 
works  of  every  age  and  of  every  race 
whose  names  are  household  words 
throughout  the  world.  And  we  shut 
our  eyes  to  them  for  the  sake  of  the 
straw  and  litter  of  the  nearest  library 
or  bookshop.  A  lifetime  will  hardly 
suffice  to  know,   as  they  ought  to  be 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.      I45 

known,  these  great  masterpieces  of 
man's  genius.  How  many  of  us  can 
name  ten  men  who  may  be  said  entirely 
to  know  (in  the  sense  in  which  a  thought- 
ful Christian  knows  the  Psalms  and  the 
Epistles)  even  a  few  of  the  greatest  ?  I 
take  them  almost  at  random,  and  I  name 
Homer,  JEschylus,  Aristophanes,  Virgil, 
Dante,  Ariosto,  Shakespeare,  Cervantes, 
Calderon,  Corneille,  Moliere,  Milton, 
Fielding,  Goethe,  Scott.  Of  course 
every  one  has  read  these,  but  who  really 
knows  them,  the  whole  meaning  of 
them?  They  are  too  often  taken  "as 
read,"  as  they  say  in  the  railway  meet- 
ings. 

Take  of  this  immortal  choir  the  liveli- 
liest,  the  easiest,  the  most  familiar,  take 
for  the  moment  the  three — Cervantes, 
Moliere,  Fielding.  Here  we  have  three 
men  who  unite  the  profoundest  insight 
into  human  nature  with  the  most  inimi- 
table wit :   Penseroso  and  L' Allegro  in 


146      THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS. 

one;  "sober,  steadfast,  and  demure," 
and  yet  with  ' '  Laughter  holding  both 
his  sides."  And  in  all  three,  different 
as  they  are,  is  an  unfathomable  pathos, 
a  brotherly  pity  for  all  human  weakness, 
spontaneous  sympathy  with  all  human 
goodness.  To  know  Bon  Quixote^  that 
is  to  follow  out  the  whole  mystery  of  its 
double  world,  is  to  know  the  very  tragi- 
comedy of  human  life,  the  contrast  of 
the  ideal  with  the  real,  of  chivalry  with 
good  sense,  of  heroic  failure  with  vulgar 
utility,  of  the  past  with  the  present,  of 
the  impossible  sublime  with  the  possible 
commonplace.  And  yet  to  how  many 
reading  men  is  Don  Quixote  little  more 
than  a  book  to  laugh  over  in  boyhood  ! 
So  Moliere  is  read  or  witnessed ;  we 
laugh  and  we  praise.  But  how  little  do 
w^e  study  with  insight  that  elaborate 
gallery  of  human  character ;  those  con- 
summate types  of  almost  every  social 
phenomenon  ;  that  genial  and  just  judge 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  1 47 

of  imposture,  folly,  vanity,  affectation, 
and  insincerity ;  that  tragic  picture  of 
the  brave  man  born  out  of  his  time,  too 
proud  and  too  just  to  be  of  use  in  his 
age !  Was  ever  truer  word  said  than 
that  about  Fielding  as  "the  prose  Homer 
of  human  nature  "  ?  And  yet  how  often 
do  we  forget  in  Tom  Jones  the  beauty  of 
unselfishness,  the  well-spring  of  good- 
ness, the  tenderness,  the  manly  healthi- 
ness and  heartiness  underlying  its  frolic 
and  its  satire,  because  we  are  absorbed, 
it  may  be,  in  laughing  at  its  humour,  or 
are  simply  irritated  by  its  grossness ! 
Nay,  JRobiiison  Crusoe  contains  (not  for 
boys  but  for  men)  more  religion,  more 
philosophy,  more  psychology,  more  polit- 
ical economy,  more  anthropology,  than 
are  found  in  many  elaborate  treatises 
on  these  special  subjects.  And  yet,  I 
imagine,  grown  men  do  not  often  read 
Robinson  Crusoe^  as  the  article  has  it, 
"  for  instruction  of  life  and  ensample  of 


148  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

manners."  The  great  books  of  the  world 
we  have  once  read ;  we  take  them  as 
read  ;  we  believe  that  we  read  them  ;  at 
least,  we  believe  that  we  know  them. 
But  to  how  few  of  us  are  they  the  daily- 
mental  food !  For  once  that  we  take 
down  our  Milton,  and  read  a  book  of 
that  "voice,"  as  Wordsworth  says, 
"  whose  sound  is  like  the  sea,"  we  take 
up  fifty  times  a  magazine  with  something 
about  Milton,  or  about  Milton's  grand- 
mother, or  a  book  stuffed  with  curious 
facts  about  the  houses  in  which  he  lived, 
and  the  juvenile  ailments  of  his  first 
wife. 

And  whilst  the  roll  of  the  great  men 
yet  unread  is  to  all  of  us  so  long,  whilst 
years  are  not  enough  to  master  the  very 
least  of  them,  we  are  incessantly  search- 
ing the  earth  for  something  new  or 
strangely  forgotten.  Brilliant  essays  are 
for  ever  extolling  some  minor  light.  It 
becomes  the  fashion  to  grow  rapturous 


THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS.  1 49 

about  the  obscure  Elizabethan  drama- 
tists ;  about  the  note  of  refinement  in 
the  lesser  men  of  Queen  Anne ;  it  is 
pretty  to  swear  by  Lyly's  Euphues  and 
Sidney's  Arcadia;  to  vaunt  Lovelace 
and  Herrick,  Marvell  and  Donne,  Robert 
Burton  and  Sir  Thomas  Browne.  All  of 
them  are  excellent  men,  who  have  written 
delightful  things,  that  may  very  well  be 
enjoyed  when  we  have  utterly  exhausted 
the  best.  But  when  one  meets  bevies  of 
hj^er-aesthetic  young  maidens,  in  lack-a- 
daisical  gowns,  who  simper  about  Greene 
and  John  Ford  (authors,  let  us  trust, 
that  they  never  have  read)  one  wonders 
if  they  all  know  Lear  or  ever  heard  of 
Alceste.  Since  to  nine  out  of  ten  of  the 
"general  readers,"  the  very  best  is  as 
yet  more  than  they  have  managed  to 
assimilate,  this  fidgeting  after  something 
curious  is  a  little  premature  and  perhaps 
artificial. 
For  this  reason  I  stand  amazed  at  the 


150      THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

lengths  of  fantastic  curiosity  to  which 
persons,  far  from  learned,  have  pushed 
the  mania  for  collecting  rare  books,  or 
prying  into  out-of  the-way  holes  and  cor- 
ners of  literature.  They  conduct  them- 
selves as  if  all  the  works  attainable 
by  ordinary  diligence  were  to  them 
sucked  as  dry  as  an  orange.  Says  one, 
"  I  came  across  a  very  curious  book, 
mentioned  in  a  parenthesis  in  the  Religio 
Medici:  only  one  other  copy  exists  in 
this  country."  I  will  not  mention  the 
work,  because  I  know  that,  if  I  did,  at 
least  fifty  libraries  would  be  ransacked 
for  it,  which  would  be  unpardonable 
waste  of  time.  "I  am  bringing  out," 
says  another  quite  simply,  "  the  lives  of 
the  washerwomen  of  the  Queens  of  Eng- 
land." And  when  it  comes  out  we  shall 
have  a  copious  collection  of  washing- 
books  some  centuries  old,  and  at  length 
understand  the  mode  of  ironing  a  ruff 
in  the  early  medieval  period.     A  very 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.      I5I 

learned  friend  of  mine  thinks  it  per- 
fectly monstrous  that  a  public  library 
should  be  without  an  adequate  collection 
of  works  in  Dutch,  though  I  believe  he 
is  the  only  frequenter  of  it  who  can  read 
that  language.  Not  long  ago  I  procured 
for  a  Russian  scholar  a  manuscript  copy 
of  a  very  rare  work  by  Greene,  the  con- 
temporary of  Shakespeare.  Greene's 
Fiineralls  is,  I  think,  as  dismal  and 
worthless  a  set  of  lines  as  one  often  sees  ; 
and  as  it  has  slumbered  for  nearly  three 
hundred  years,  I  should  be  willing  to  let 
it  be  its  own  undertaker.  But  this  un- 
savoury carrion  is  at  last  to  be  dug  out 
of  its  grave  ;  for  it  is  now  translated 
into  Russian  and  published  in  Moscow  (to 
the  honour  and  glory  of  the  Russian  pro- 
fessor) in  order  to  delight  and  inform  the 
Muscovite  public,  where  perhaps  not  ten 
in  a  million  can  as  much  as  read  Shake- 
speare. This  or  that  collector  again, 
with  the  labour  of  half  a  lifetime  and 


152  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

by  means  of  half  his  fortune,  has  amassed 
a  library  of  old  plays,  every  one  of  them 
worthless  in  diction,  in  plot,  in  senti- 
ment, and  in  purpose  ;  a  collection  far 
more  stupid  and  uninteresting  in  fact 
than  the  burlesques  and  pantomimes  of 
the  last  fifty  years.  And  yet  this  insatia- 
ble student  of  old  plays  will  probably 
know  less  of  Moliere  and  Alfieri  than 
Moliere's  housekeeper  or  Alfieri's  valet ; 
and  possibly  he  has  never  looked  into 
such  poets  as  Calderon  and  Lope  de 
Vega. 

Collecting  rare  books  and  forgotten 
authors  is  perhaps  of  all  the  collecting 
manias  the  most  foolish  in  our  day. 
There  is  much  to  be  said  for  rare  china 
and  curious  beetles.  The  china  is  occa- 
sionally beautiful ;  and  the  beetles  at 
least  are  droll.  But  rare  books  now  are, 
by  the  nature  of  the  case,  worthless 
books;  and  their  rarity  usually  consists 
in  this,  that  the  printer  made  a  blunder 


THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS.  1 53 

in  the  text,  or  that  they  contain  some- 
thing exceptionally  nasty  or  silly.  To 
affect  a  profound  interest  in  neglected 
authors  and  uncommon  books,  is  a  sign 
for  the  most  part — not  that  a  man  has 
exhausted  the  resources  of  ordinary  lite- 
rature— but  that  he  has  no  real  respect 
for  the  greatest  productions  of  the  great- 
est men  of  the  world.  This  bibliomania 
seizes  hold  of  rational  beings  and  so 
perverts  them,  that  in  the  sufferer's 
mind  the  human  race  exists  for  the  sake 
of  the  books,  and  not  the  books  for  the 
sake  of  the  human  race.  There  is  one 
book  they  might  read  to  good  purpose, 
the  doings  of  a  great  book  collector — 
who  once  lived  in  La  Mancha.  To  the 
collector,  and  sometimes  to  the  scholar, 
the  book  becomes  a  fetich  or  idol,  and  is 
worthy  of  the  worship  of  mankind,  even 
if  it  be  not  of  the  slightest  use  to  any- 
body. As  the  book  exists,  it  must  have 
the  compliment  paid  it  of  being  invited 


154  THE   CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

to  the  shelves.  The  "library  is  imper- 
fect without  it,"  although  the  library- 
will,  so  to  speak,  stink  when  it  is  there. 
The  great  books  are  of  course  the  coro- 
mon  books  ;  and  these  are  treated  by 
collectors  and  librarians  with  sovereign 
contempt.  The  more  dreadful  an  abor- 
tion of  a  book  the  rare  volume  may  be, 
the  more  desperate  is  the  struggle  of 
libraries  to  possess  it.  Civilisation  in 
fact  has  evolved  a  complete  apparatus, 
an  order  of  men,  and  a  code  of  ideas, 
for  the  express  purpose  one  may  say  of 
degrading  the  great  books.  It  suffo- 
cates them  under  mountains  of  little 
books,  and  gives  the  place  of  honour  to 
that  which  is  plainly  literary  carrion. 

Now  I  suppose,  at  the  bottom  of  all 
this  lies  that  rattle  and  restlessness  of 
life  which  belongs  to  the  industrial 
Maelstrom  wherein  we  ever  revolve. 
And  connected  therewith  comes  also 
that    literary  dandyism,   which    results 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  I  55 

from  the  pursuit  of  letters  without  any 
social  purpose  or  any  systematic  faith. 
To  read  from  the  pricking  of  some  cere- 
bral itch  rather  than  from  a  desire  of 
forming  judgments  ;  to  get,  like  an 
Alpine  club  stripling,  to  the  top  of  some 
unsealed  pinnacle  of  culture ;  to  use 
books  as  a  sedative,  as  a  means  of  excit- 
ing a  mild  intellectual  titillation,  instead 
of  as  a  means  of  elevating  the  nature  ; 
to  dribble  on  in  a  perpetual  literary 
gossip,  in  order  to  avoid  the  effort  of 
bracing  the  mind  to  think — such  is  our 
habit  in  an  age  of  utterly  chaotic  educa- 
tion. We  read,  as  the  bereaved  poet 
made  rhymes — 

"  For  the  unquiet  heart  and  brain, 
A  use  in  measured  language  lies; 
The  sad  mechanic  exercise, 

Like  dull  narcotics,  numbing  pain." 

We,  to  whom  steam  and  electricity  have 
given  almost  everything  excepting  bigger 


156  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

brains  and  hearts,  who  have  a  new  in- 
vention ready  for  every  meeting  of  the 
Koyal  Institution,  who  want  new  things 
to  talk  about  faster  than  children  want 
new  toys  to  break,  we  cannot  take  up 
the  books  we  have  seen  about  us  since 
our  childhood :  Milton,  or  Moliere,  or 
Scott.  It  feels  like  donning  knee- 
breeches  and  buckles,  to  read  what 
everybody  has  read,  what  everybody 
can  read,  and  which  our  very  fathers 
thought  good  entertainment  scores  of 
years  ago.  Hard-worked  men  and  over- 
wrought women  crave  an  occupation 
which  shall  free  them  from  their 
thoughts  and  yet  not  take  them  from 
their  world.  And  thus  it  comes  that 
we  need  at  least  a  thousand  new  books 
every  season,  whilst  we  have  rarely  a 
spare  hour  left  for  the  greatest  of  all. 
But  I  am  getting  into  a  vein  too  serious 
for  our  purpose:  education  is  a  long 
and  thorny  topic.     I  will  cite  but  the 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  1 57 

words  on  this  head  of  the  great  Bishop 
Butler.  "  The  great  number  of  books 
and  papers  of  amusement  which,  of  one 
kind  or  another,  daily  come  in  one's 
way,  have  in  part  occasioned,  and  most 
perfectly  fall  in  with  and  humour,  this 
idle  way  of  reading  and  considering 
things.  By  this  means  time,  even  in 
solitude,  is  happily  got  rid  of,  without 
the  pain  of  attention ;  neither  is  any 
part  of  it  more  put  to  the  account  of 
idleness,  one  can  scarce  forbear  saying 
is  spent  with  less  thought,  than  great 
part  of  that  which  is  spent  in  reading." 
But  this  was  written  a  century  and  a 
half  ago,  in  1729  ;  since  which  date,  let 
us  trust,  the  multiplicity  of  print  and 
the  habits  of  desultory  reading  have 
considerably  abated. 

A  philosopher  with  whom  I  hold  (but 
whose  opinions  I  have  no  present  inten- 
tion of  propounding)  proposed  a  method 
of  dealing  with  this  indiscriminate  use 


158      THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

of  books,  which  I  think  is  worthy  of  at- 
tention. He  framed  a  short  collection 
of  books  for  constant  and  general  read- 
ing. He  put  it  forward  "  with  the  view 
of  guiding  the  more  thoughtful  minds 
among  the  people  in  their  choice  for 
constant  use. "  He  declares  that  "both 
the  intellect  and  the  moral  character 
suffer  grievously  at  the  present  time 
from  irregular  reading."  It  was  not  in- 
tended to  put  a  bar  upon  other  reading, 
or  to  supersede  special  study.  It  is 
designed  as  a  type  of  a  healthy  and 
rational  syllabus  of  essential  books,  fit 
for  common  teaching  and  daily  use.  It 
presents  a  working  epitome  of  what  is 
best  and  most  enduring  in  the  literature 
of  the  world.  The  entire  collection 
would  form  in  the  shape  in  which  books 
now  exist  in  modern  libraries,  something 
like  five  hundred  volumes.  They  em- 
brace books  both  of  ancient  and  modern 
times,  in  all  the  five  principal  languages 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS.  I  59 

of  modern  Europe.  It  is  divided  into 
four  sections  :  Poetry,  Science,  History, 
Religion. 

The  principles  on  what  it  is  framed 
are  these  :  First,  it  collects  the  best  in 
all  the  great  departments  of  human 
thought,  so  that  no  part  of  education 
shall  be  wholly  wanting.  Next,  it  puts 
together  the  greatest  books,  of  universal 
and  permanent  value,  and  the  greatest 
and  the  most  enduring  only.  Next,  it 
measures  the  greatness  of  books  not  by 
their  brilliancy,  or  even  their  learning, 
but  by  their  power  of  presenting  some 
tyj)ical  chapter  in  thought,  some  domi- 
nant phase  of  history;  or  else  it  mea- 
sures them  by  their  power  of  idealising 
man  and  nature,  or  of  giving  harmony 
to  our  moral  and  intellectual  activity. 
Lastly,  the  test  of  the  general  value  of 
books  is  the  permanent  relation  they 
bear  to  the  common  civilisation  of 
Europe. 


l6o      THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

Some  such  firm  foot-hold  in  the  vast 
and  increasing  torrent  of  literature  it  is 
certainly  urgent  to  find,  unless  all  that 
is  great  in  literature  is  to  be  borne  away 
in  the  flood  of  books.  With  this,  we 
may  avoid  an  interminable  wandering 
over  a  pathless  waste  of  waters.  With- 
out it,  we  may  read  everything  and  know 
nothing  ;  we  may  be  curious  about  any- 
thing that  chances,  and  indifferent  to 
everything  that  profits.  Having  such  a 
catalogue  before  our  eyes,  with  its  per- 
petual warning — non  muUa  sed  muUti^n 
— we  shall  see  how  with  our  insatiable 
consumption  of  print  we  wander,  like 
unclassed  spirits,  round  the  outskirts 
only  of  those  Elysian  fields  where  the 
great  dead  dwell  and  hold  high  converse. 
As  it  is  we  hear  but  in  a  faint  echo  that 
voice  which  cries  : — 

"  Onorate  raltissimo  Poeta: 
L'ombra  sua  torna,  ch'era  dipartita." 


THE  CHOICE  OF  BOORS.  l6l 

"We  need  to  be  reminded  every  day,  how 
many  are  the  books  of  inimitable  glory, 
which,  with  all  our  eagerness  after  read- 
ing, we  have  never  taken  in  our  hands. 
It  will  astonish  most  of  us  to  find  how 
much  of  our  very  industry  is  given  to 
the  books  which  leave  no  mark,  how 
often  we  rake  in  the  litter  of  the  print- 
ing-press, whilst  a  crown  of  gold  and 
rubies  is  offered  us  in  vain. 

Postscript. — I  have  elsewhere  given, 
with  some  explanation  and  introduction, 
the  library  of  Auguste  Comte,  which  forms 
the  basis  of  the  whole  of  the  essay  above. 
The  catalogue  is  to  be  found  in  many  of 
his  publications,  as  the  Catechism,  Trtibner 
and  Co.  (translated  :  London,  1858) ;  and 
also  in  the  fourth  volume  of  the  Positive 
Polity  (translated:  London,  1877,  pp.  363, 
483),  where  its  use  and  meaning  are  ex- 
plained. Those  who  may  take  an  errone- 
ous idea  of  its  purpose,  and  may  think 
that  such  a  catalogue  would  serve  in  the 


1 62  THE  CHOICE  OF  BOOKS. 

way  of  an  ordinary  circulating  library, 
may  need  to  be  reminded  that  it  is  designed 
as  tbe  basis  of  a  scheme  of  education,  for 
one  particular  system  of  pbilosopby,  and 
as  the  manual  of  an  organised  form  of  re- 
ligion. It  is,  in  fact,  tlie  literary  resume 
of  Positivist  teaching ;  and  as  such  alone 
can  it  be  used.  It  is,  moreover,  designed 
to  be  of  common  use  to  all  Western  Europe, 
and  to  be  ultimately  extended  to  all  classes. 
It  is  essentially  a  people's  library  for  po- 
pular instruction;  it  is  of  permanent  use 
only;  and  it  is  intended  to  serve  as  a  type. 
Taken  in  connection  with  the  Calendar, 
which  contains  the  names  of  nearly  two 
hundred  and  fifty  authors,  it  may  serve  as 
a  guide  of  the  books  "that  the  world 
would  not  willingly  let  die. "  But  it  must 
be  remembered  that  it  has  no  special  rela- 
tion to  current  views  of  education,  to  Eng- 
lish literature,  much  less  to  the  literature 
of  the  day.  It  was  drawn  up  thirty  years 
ago  by  a  French  philosopher,  who  passed 
his  life  in  Paris,  and  who  had  read  no  new 


THE  CHOICE  OP  BOOKS.  1 63 

books  for  twenty  years.  And  it  was  de- 
signedly limited  by  bim  to  such  a  compass 
that  bard-worked  men  migbt  bope  to 
master  it;  in  order  to  give  tbem  an  apevQU 
of  wbat  tbe  ancient  and  tbe  modern  world 
bad  left  of  most  great  in  eacb  language 
and  in  eacb  department  of  tbougbt.  To 
attempt  to  use  it,  or  to  judge  it,  from  any 
point  of  view  but  tbis,  would  be  entirely  to 
mistake  its  character  and  object. 


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I 


